Imagine! You can empower women and girls with clean cookstoves in the Eastern province of Zambia. With your help, we can provide 400 families with energy-efficient, clean cookstoves that will lower the rates of burns and respiratory diseases, improve family finances, and heavily reduce deforstation. You will be empowering a project notable for its focus on environmental education, its sensitivity to the local culture, and its long-term sustainability.
Zambia faces extreme economic challenges, environmental degradation, and severe health risks. Women and girls in most of the villages still cook over the traditional 3 stone fire. The search for firewood is driving severe deforestation with over 300,000 hectares been lost every year, erosion and landslides in the mountains, polluting the water on which everyone depends. Smoke from the fires is causing respiratory disease, and the cost of firewood continues to grow.
Energy-efficient cookstoves can reduce the need for firewood in households by over 70%. This means immediate reductions in tree loss, air pollution, and respiratory disease, especially for women, children, and the elderly. Families won't need to spend hours searching for firewood-or seeking firewood for purchase leaving more time available for improved quality of life, like better nutrition, education for their children, even financial stability.
This project has impressive short and long-term benefits. Each cookstove saves one commercial firewood tree per month and reduces household air pollution by 99%. With a proven 10 year lifespan, these 400 cookstoves will prevent the logging of 48,000 trees. sequester 8,176 tons of CO2, and increase savings per family by US$3,000 (a substantial quantity given the 70% poverty rate). Our cookstoves are durable and movable.
