Clean Cookstoves... Save Trees.. Save Lives

As a follow up to the May 17th blog, this blog is certainly somewhat overdue! With the huge support of Paradigm Stoves , we now have Institutional Stoves working in 9 schools, plus our own Staff Kitchen. This donation has been a resounding success, and no unintended consequences have so far been thrown up. The implementation of the project was bigger than either we, or Paradigm, could have imagined. In the first instance the smaller nursery schools had no kitchens... so step one was to erect simple secure, weather proof, structures.. only not so simple when we realised that we would have to make new roads to Rumate and Singa'un nurseries, before we had any hope of getting materials and stoves to them! Finding a route through the luggas, rocks and dense bush to Singa'un required a day on foot feeling rather Dr. Livingstone'ish, before we could hope to get a pick up through. The huge added advantage of this is that now we have a road that the mobile clinic can traverse once a month to this remote Samburu village. How people survive in this location in the dry season beggars belief.. the trip for water is a 6 hour round trip with donkeys that each household has to perform every two days.
Below is the new kitchen at Narasha Nursery school-

These stoves use a very minimal amount of wood... where children were collecting wood on a daily basis this is now reduced to once or twice per month. Paradigm also provided a training for all the school cooks who have been universally thrilled with the stoves.. where we could have foreseen some resistance to 'new' technology the benefits are all self evident.. virtually no smoke , much quicker cooking times and , an unforeseen benefit of much easier cleaning has led not only to happy cooks but also to a real pride in the cleanliness of the kitchens.

In addition we have given away 80 household stoves to the Ol Lentille employees, Conservancy Rangers and and Health Workers, and have sold another 100 at subsidised prices. We still have some 40 more to sell. This area of the donation has been enormously interesting- (if at times somewhat challenging!) showing how much research we still need to do to work with communities on the best fit of stove for them. Communities being made up of individuals, of course means that no one solution fits all: age , gender, education levels, family size, are just some of the variables we need to consider. This is still very much a work in progress that we will come back to as we collate our results...