Expert Africa

From curbing deforestation to encouraging female empowerment and improving health and living conditions, there are myriad benefits to this neat stove-in-a-box. Replacing traditional, open-fire cooking with these ingenious, brick-mounted, flat-pack metal Eco-Stoves has the power to make an immense difference to both the environment and individuals, especially women, who use them.

The key is fuel-efficiency: these stoves use much less wood than an open fire and cook well with relatively small twigs. Hence, it’s estimated that each Eco-Stove stops between two and four tonnes of CO2 emissions per year.

It also saves the women of the household (it’s invariably the women!) hours of hard, daily wood-collection and the time waiting for inefficient, open fires to build up, thus affording them valuable extra time to embark on other projects, or education.

The handmade mud-brick surround, which contributes to the Eco-Stove’s efficiency, also reduces the risk of fire injuries, whilst the small, contained twigs produces less smoke, and so reduce the incidence of smoke-induced respiratory diseases, from pneumonia to lung cancer, which are all too common here.