Why Should You Care
Household Air Pollution(HAP) is one of India’s most devastating killers, claiming more lives each year than HIV, Malaria and TB combined, according to World Health Organisation (WHO) figures. This amounts to 1 million premature deaths in India and more than 4 million globally.
Maximum families have women cooking in the house - Pregnant women, Old women, Middle aged women. Other family members are passive inhalers of the smoke.
While this is at the House hold level issues, for an urban dweller, direct negative impact lies through depleting forest cover and hence incremental GHG into the air that we breathe in.
About the cause
Smokeless Cookstove Foundation, through its signature training programmes and mobilization camps aims to achieve a twofold impact – provide an easy skill based model to train direct communities/ grassroots NGOs/ SHGs/ Cooperatives/ FPOs or any other community led organisations. This training involves learning how to make a zero-cost improved mud cookstove based on the clean combustion of Rocket Stove Technology. The other crucial impact that becomes a subset of this model is additional livelihood opportunity for the community members to use this skill and become ‘stove makers’ for their community by installing these cookstoves in interested HH and earn income from it.
Activities
Currently the team is piloting a concept of ‘Clean cooking for Livelihood’ as a model under which 5 to 10 community participants (preferably women) are trained as master trainers/ stove makers and are hired to scale up the stove installation within the village households. These women can be paid 125% to 150% of the per day daily wage rates for 6 hours of work or 100% daily wages for 4 hours of work per day. This model allows women to earn their livelihood towards a crucial problem mitigation by being near their homes and families and working within and for their community.
On similar lines, SCF recently conducted a ‘Train the trainer’ concept in the remote village in Pithoragarh district of Uttarakhand where 8 community influencer (6 men and 2 women) learnt how to make this cookstoves.
Area of Work
SCF team has run various micro, small and mid-scale projects in several states across the country to introduce the concept of a zero-cost improved mud stove and the opportunity that this provides to gradually transition towards cleaner cooking option. The model also provide opportunity for additional income to HH users of this cookstove
Founding Members
Nitisha Agrawal – Founder & Director, Smokeless Cookstove Foundation; (Independent Consultant for Clean energy transition projects)
Learn More
www.smokelesscookstovefoundation.org
https://www.linkedin.com/in/smokeless-cookstove-foundation-0761a4178/
https://www.instagram.com/smokelesscookstove_team/