Mission

The Darfur Stoves Project seeks to protect Darfuri women by providing them with specially developed stoves which require less firewood, decreasing women’s exposure to violence while collecting firewood and their need to trade food rations for fuel.

Category

Family Support

Additional Information

Impact: The Berkeley-Darfur Stove uses half the amount of firewood as the traditional three-stone fires common in Darfur. With our collaborators, the Darfur Stoves Project will have distributed over 20,000 stoves by the end of July 2011. Safety: The two million displaced Darfuris currently living in internally displaced persons (IDP) camps receive food aid and cooking oil from a variety of humanitarian aid organizations. However, they are still responsible for gathering firewood as fuel for cooking. Due to the aridity of the land and the size of the camps, wood is scarce and growing scarcer. With deforestation, women and young girls must walk further and further from the relative safety of the camps in search of wood. Today, Darfuri women must walk up to seven hours, three to five times per week, just to find a single tree. These searches are the main reason why Darfuri women and girls leave the relative safety of the camps for the open countryside, where they are vulnerable to violent attacks and sexual assault. The Berkeley-Darfur Stove reduces the quantity of firewood women need to cook for their families by at least 50 percent. This allows Darfuri women to dramatically reduce the amount of time spent outside the camps collecting firewood. Livelihoods: Rather than collecting their own firewood, many Darfuri families now purchase it from dealers. The cost of firewood means that as many as half of Darfuri families in displacement camps miss at least one meal per week. In a gesture of cruel irony, families now pay for cooking fuel by selling the very food they hoped to cook. A Berkeley-Darfur Stove, which costs USD$20 to produce and distribute, will save a household that currently purchases wood for a three-stone fire more than USD$300 per year in fuel costs, or $1500 over the five-year lifespan of the stove. Furthermore, the Darfur Stoves Project’s collaborators, SAG and Oxfam America, currently employ 13 Darfuris in our stove assembly workshop in El Fasher, Darfur. As we open more assembly shops, we will be able to provide even more people with jobs.  Health: According to The Partnership for Clean Indoor Air, nearly half of the world’s population—three billion people—cook their food and heat their homes by burning coal and biomass (including wood, dung, and compost) in open fires or rudimentary stoves similar to those used in Darfur. The World Health Organization estimates that 1.9 million people die prematurely each year from exposure to indoor smoke from burning solid fuels. According to the World Health Organization’s Fuel for Life report, exposure to these harmful air pollutants is equivalent to consuming two packs of cigarettes per day. Women and children have the greatest rates of exposure, as they are the household members most likely to gather fuel and cook family meals. The Berkeley-Darfur Stove requires half as much fuel than traditional cooking methods, limiting exposure to toxic indoor smoke. Environmental Impact: The average Darfuri family uses 1.8 tons of firewood for cooking each year. Using a Berkeley-Darfur Stove cuts this amount by more than half, saving 1.5 tons of firewood over the course of a year and reducing environmental degradation in Darfur. The average household in Darfur’s displacement camps emits 3 tons of CO2 equivalent per year from cooking with a three-stone fire. A household using a Berkeley-Darfur Stove reduces its emissions by more than 1.5 tons of CO2 equivalent per year. The average US car (traveling 12,000 miles per year and getting 20 mpg) emits 5.2 metric tons of CO2 per year. With stoves lasting an average of 5 years, each Berkeley-Darfur Stove in the field reduces more CO2 emissions than removing an average US car off the road for an entire year.