what is a darfur stove?

The Berkeley-Darfur Stove is more than a stove. It equates to safety, improved nutrition, the opportunity to earn an income and the chance the environment needs to recover. It's an awful lot for a small stove to promise but the Berkeley-Darfur Stove delivers. Just ask the women who have one!

understanding the problem

Imagine having to knowingly put yourself at grave risk just to feed your family. Imagine the fear of being hours from safety with no hope of protection. Imagine having to rely on food rations to live — and being forced to sell some of them to buy wood just to avoid the risk of rape. No one should have to image this yet it is reality for thousands of women every day in Darfur.

Now imagine there is a solution. And imagine you can be part of it.

the solution

safety

The Berkeley Darfur Stove provides women in refugee camps a measure of safety. Because of the efficiency of the stove – four times more efficient than traditional 3-stone fires and two times more efficient than clay stoves, these women need to leave the camps much less often to forage for fire wood.

This stove fully encloses the open flames, and thus substantially reduces the danger of the dense straw-and-stick shelters burning down because of open fire cooking. The stove produces much less smoke and thus reduces smoke inhalation in the cramped shelters during indoor cooking.

better nutrition

A significant majority of the refugees miss one or more meals each week due to a severe scarcity of fuel wood for cooking. Furthermore, a significant fraction of refugees reported selling a part of their food rations to middlemen for cash to purchase fuel wood for cooking their meals. Health risks are increased due to the stress and conditions of living as a displaced person in a refugee camp. A consistent diet is important and our stoves are addressing this issue.

income potential

The wood is rapidly becoming scarce, and it already takes an average of 7 hours per trek to find enough wood to cook family meals. By saving wood, the women save time, allowing them to reclaim their lives. In our surveys, some women said they are so exhausted that they would use the extra time to simply rest; but others said that would put it towards income earning activities such as making mats.

Additionally the Darfur Stoves Project designed this light metal stoves so that they could easily be manufactured, in large numbers, in Darfur with simple tools — enabling the refugees to reclaim the dignity by being part of the solution, and earning an income by building stoves.

reports and presentations

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Field Report, December 2006 (PDF 371 KB)

The Darfur Stoves Project Story (PDF 2.35 MB)