The Challenge
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Throughout Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), rural communities rely on firewood for cooking. These households still cook primarily on three-stone open fires, just as they have done for thousands of years. They primarily use large branches and logs that are unsustainably harvested from surrounding forests and wooded areas of agricultural lands, a major driver of deforestation all throughout SSA.
Three-stone fires are very smoky and emit dangerous levels of fine particulate matter "PM2.5“ that are inhaled and go deep into the lungs. In many SSA countries, household air pollution from cooking with solid fuels is a leading risk factor contributing to disease and premature deaths. Since women do most of the cooking and at the same time look after their young children, both women and children become extremely vulnerable to harmful household air pollution. In addition, women and children gather firewood at least 2-3 times per week walking as far as 5 km from their homes to find wood. This amounts to many hours of drudgery per week.
Simple and Effective Solution -
TLC-CQC Rocket Stove
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C-Quest Capital LLC (CQC) and its local partners in SSA have installed over 200,000 improved mud/brick and high quality stainless steel cookstoves in rural households, called the TLC-CQC Rocket Stove, replacing inefficient threestone fires. The TLC-CQC Rocket Stove reduces firewood consumption by more than 50%. The TLC-CQC Rocket Stove combined with better-ventilated kitchens reduces burns and household air pollution from open fire cooking, and reduces incidence of respiratory and heart disease, premature and underweight birth, and blindness. In addition, the stove enables cooking to be fueled with small diameter fast-growing nitrogen-fixing agroforestry trees grown on farms and with crop residues otherwise wasted, reducing land degradation. This reduces the burden of gathering firewood over long distances at personal risk. It allows women to regain hundreds of hours per year that can be used for other productive activities and leisure.
Stove-in-a-Box (SIAB)
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CQC and Mimi Moto have co-designed the SIAB concept for the TLC-CQC Rocket Stove for Humanitarian Settings in Sub-Saharan Africa. The SIAB is a cost-effective solution for agencies that support camps that want to see a self-help model for meeting the cooking needs of the people.
The metal parts for the TLC-CQC Rocket Stove have been re-designed and with the addition of a cast-iron stove top, fit in a 26 x 25 x 3.75 cm box (weight 2 kg) (the size of small pizza box). The boxes also include instruction drawings necessary to assemble the parts and how they fit into the stove body. Instructions on construction and maintenance are provided to households during hands-on-training events by CQC’s on-the-ground partners. The materials needed to build bricks and mortar for the stove body will be locally available and provided by the households or local partner organizations. CQC provides the metal parts to the household at no-cost.
The bricks and mud/dung mortar for the stove body are hand made by the households according to specifications. The metal fuel shelf innovatively doubles as a brick mold that is used to form the bricks that are dried outside for 10-14 days prior to stove construction. Households spend 2 person-days in building the stove. This includes the time for training on how to build and use the stove, collection of materials necessary to produce the bricks and stove, and then producing the bricks and the stove. This “self-help” model has proven successful in gaining the buy-in from the households in adopting their new stove.
Approximately 12,250 units can fit into a 20ft container, 25,500 units in a 40ft container, and 28,500 units in a 40ft HC Container.
