Nonprofit Chronicles

Boiling tea with a Project Gaia cookstove in Kenya

No one is getting rich making cookstoves for the poor, least of all Harry Stokes. Stokes is the unpaid executive director of a small nonprofit called Project Gaia, which has been trying since the late 1990s to get cookstoves that burn ethanol or methanol into the hands of some of the estimated 3 billion people on earth who still cook over open fires using biomass-wood, charcoal, agricultural waste or dung.

Cooking over smoky, open fires generates household air pollution which is responsible for an estimated 4.3 million premature deaths a year, more than HIV/AIDs or diarrhea. These deaths are preventable. No one dies from cooking in rich countries.

Based in Gettysburg, Pa., with operations in Ethiopia, Nigeria, Kenya, Madagascar and partnerships in several other countries, including Haiti, Project Gaia has made modest progress in the last 15 years, notably in Ethiopia, where it supplies cookstoves and ethanol fuel to about 7,000 households in three refugee camps, an effort supported by the UN. Its other projects are small as well, no more than a few thousand stoves in each country, at least for now.

“We are on the cusp of scaling up in Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, South Africa, and Nigeria,” Stokes told me the other day, when we met over coffee. “The technology is tried and true.”

Stokes is an optimist. You have to be to work in the cookstove sector. People have been trying for decades to invent, produce, market, sell or give away cookstoves that the world’s poor women want to use. They have met with more failure than success. Changing behavior is hard; women have been cooking over open fires for generations. Kirk Smith, a professor of environmental health at Berkeley and the world’s leading public-health researcher on cookstoves, told me recently that more people are cooking over open fires today than ever, because population growth has outpaced efforts to get cookstoves adopted. Making cookstoves to burn biomass cleanly has been an especially vexing challenge.

As journalist Meera Subramanian writes in A River Runs Again, a new book about India and the environment with a long chapter about cookstoves: “No one has yet created a biomass stove that is truly harmless to human and planetary health and affordable and desirable to the families that need them most.”

I’ve been reporting on the cookstove sector, while preparing an article for publication (soon, I hope) on the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, a public-private partnership launched by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2010. It’s a fascinating sector, populated by smart, dedicated people. I’ve met with Radha Muthiah, the CEO of the alliance and Jacob Moss, an estimable and mostly-unsung career civil servant who helped to create the alliance. I’ve spoken by phone with Kirk Smith; Kevin Starr of the Mulago Foundation; Ron Bills, who leads a fast-growing Colorado-based cookstove manufacturer called Envirofit; Eric Reynolds, who runs Inyenyeri a cookstove startup in Rwanda; Dean Still, executive director of the Aprovecho Research Center; and Elisa Derby of Winrock International, who has worked on cookstoves for more than a decade. And I’ve come away with as many questions as answers: Continue Reading