 pots Darfur women use, she said. That means they can be assured the stoves are, in fact, being used.
“The science of maximizing efficiency is matched with customizing them to fit the pots most commonly used in Darfur,” Stein said. “We also added a wind collar to keep the fire from burning too fast and to maximize combustion.”
The stove was designed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientist Ashok Gadgil, who is now also president of Potential Energy’s Board of Directors.
In 2005, when the Darfur Stove was first invented, things were particularly bad for the women in the refugee camps in Darfur, Sudan. Living in cramped quarters in the war-torn country, they were spending seven hours a day, many days a week, foraging for firewood in the sparse, desert-like region. Often, women would be assaulted as they went out looking for wood. When the wood ran out in the sparsely-forested land, women would buy wood, often trading food for wood.
The U.S. Agency for International Development asked LBL’s Gadgil if he could do something about this problem. Gadgil, with the help of Engineers without Borders and consultation from the women in Darfur, invented a stove that could be cheaply manufactured and easily assembled.
Stein said users save $300 a year or $1 a day on wood: an amount that goes far in Sudan where the annual income is roughly $1,000.
To assure that the women cooking meals will, in fact, use the stoves, Potential Energy has begun selling them in some places for a nominal fee, realizing that if users invest in something, they value it more. “We’ve sold 5,500 of them, for the equivalent of about $8 each,” while still distributing them for free in the new displacement camps.
Now Potential Energy plans to expand into Ethiopia and is consulting with rural cooks there for what features a stove sold there would need.
Although a 501(c)3 nonprofit, Potential Energy is among a new breed of “social enterprises” that is solving a need, but aims to do it in a self-sustaining, income-producing way, she said.