By Monica Alvarez Malvido | Special and Innovation Project Officer
Dear friends of Sustainable Rural Life,
Remember that we recently installed 100 clean cookstoves in Tehuacán Cuicatlán Biosphere Reserve and ten more at remote indigenous community called Atlequizayan, in northern Puebla? Good news is that at the beginning of March we did a supervision visit to make sure the families were using their stoves properly. The results were outstanding!
First we visited Atlequizayan and we interviewed the beneficiaries with the translation support of the community leader Cirila. Only one woman had some trouble with her stove and we are currently doing everything we can to sort out this problem. The other nine women were extremely happy with their stove, now they don´t have to go every two days to collect 30kilograms of firewood, they now use less than half of what they used to!
Next day, we went straight to San Pedro Tetitlán, Tehuacán. The ecosystem is completely different, it is a desert ecosystem so the clean cookstoves are a different model and better adapted to areas where firewood is very limited. We went to visit 15 houses and all of them where using their clean coostove. Only two of the women are still using their open fires along with their clean cookstove. This is because they thought that the new stove was only limited to tortilla making but now they realized it can be used for every meal.
We also had a meeting with the local assembly. They made us notice that there is a very high demand of clean cookstoves in the region. A surprising finding was that the community primary school located inside the biosphere reserve has included environmental awareness lessons in their education program. This is great news because young kids become aware of the importance of ecosystem services and share the knowledge at home!
This 2017, Sustainable Rural Life will focus on empowering sustainable community centers and strengthening productive initiatives that allow communities to have a healthy lifestyle while protecting their environment.
We need your support to increase the number of these ecotecnologies that can change the life of rural women in Mexico!
Thank you for your interest and support,
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
