5% Of the proceeds from every stove sold on this site is donated to the Human
Relief Organization's "Billion Stoves" program.
* As of 7/09/2007
The Billion Stoves Program
One of the worst problems for up to half of the world’s population is cooking with wood fires. The primitive cooking methods used result in a great amount of smoke and air pollution which causes lung disease, glaucoma, smoke inhalation, carbon monoxide poisoning and about a million deaths a year. Children are also frequently burned in these fires. Typically too much wood fuel is used in these primitive fires which contribute to deforestation and increasing amounts of labor are required to collect wood from greater and greater distances as resources are depleted.
In many areas the women of households must expend 4-8 hours per day just to obtain cooking fuel and wasting valuable labor which could be applied to more productive work.
Haiti is a case example where there is virtually no tree’s left because they have all been cut down for cooking fuel. Haiti is literally 98% deforested leaving the people in desperate conditions where soil erosion is a huge problem and where deadly mudslides can happen as did in a recent disaster which killed thousands of people when a hurricane passed over the island.
Darfur refugees in Sudan are also more vulnerable because they have to leave the safety of the camps to collect cooking fuel which depletes rapidly. The refugees have to go out on foot further and further to obtain cooking fuel as the nearby wood is depleted; this makes the women and children in particular subject to attack by militias and bandits outside of the safety of the camps in the endless laborious work of collecting firewood.
This problem that kills a million people a year, contributes to deforestation and terrible air pollution in many areas and affects up to half of the world’s people is little known to most of us in developed countries that take for granted clean, safe and convenient cooking, using gas, electric and propane stoves. Fortunately solutions to these problems exist in the form of better designed wood cooking stoves.
The billion stoves program is about education, promotion and distribution of more efficient and cleaner burning biomass cooking stoves. It is called “Billion Stoves” as an approximate number of improved biomass cooking stoves needed worldwide. Such improved stoves are already available and when enough of them are in use they will greatly reduce deforestation, labor for collecting cooking fuel, improve air quality and minimize the negative health effects resulting from poor cooking methods.
The billion stoves program will work through various partnerships with corporate sponsors, foreign governments, NGO’s and humanitarian relief agencies. This program is meant to apply known solutions to this very large problem which hampers the health and economic development of nearly half of the world’s people by applying the appropriate technological and social solutions to where they are needed.
For More Information About The Human Relief Organization and this program or to contact them click on this banner:
WWW.HUMANRELIEF.NET