By Nancy Moore | VIP Board Member
Thanks so much to all of you who donated to Village Improvement Project’s Improved Cookstoves for 25 Liberian Village Homes during the May and June fundraising campaign. GlobalGiving matched your donations at 60%. In addition, the Cookstove Project earned a bonus prize of $1,200 for coming in second place out of the hundreds of other projects that were part of the matching-fund campaign. The Improved Cookstoves Project now has $12,108 in funding which is enough to move the project forward on the ground in Liberia.
VIP President/CEO Dr. LeRoy Boikai is now making plans to travel to Liberia sometime this fall to conduct field tests with Liberian-made rocket stoves. He will be accompanied by a skilled technician who will demonstrate the rocket stoves and teach village women how to use them when cooking their family’s meals. The plan is to recruit a small number of village women who are willing to try the new stoves for a few weeks and then provide feedback to Dr. Boikai. We need to know how the stoves perform in daily use and whether or not the women would be willing to give up their old, three-stone open fire pit or coal pots in favor of the improved stove.
Dr. Boikai and his team will also be talking with the women taking part in the field test and their families to determine the extent of the benefits of using rocket stoves they experienced versus the traditional method. Did they use significantly less fuel? Was there less unhealthy smoke? Were they able to save money by not buying coal? Most importantly, are the benefits of using a rocket stove enough for them to make the switch permanently?
Stay tuned! A future report will have the results of the field test and Dr. Boikai’s observations which will shape the Improved Cookstove Project going forward.
Please share our project with friends and loved ones. We'd like to hear from you about what it means to be a donor to VIP's Improved Cookstove Project.
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