Andrée Sosler/DSP

Atima Sabiel's life had been a struggle from the beginning

. She gave me the broad outline of her story while I sat on a woven mat in her small thatched hut in northern Darfur. Sabiel's father died before she was born, leaving her mother to raise Atima and her siblings alone. When Atima was a teenager, the Darfur conflict began and the Janjaweed militia attacked the village next door. Atima fled, and for two years she was on the run, scared for her life. Finally, she made it to El Fasher, the desert town that is the capital of North Darfur, where she married and had four children. But her life remained a struggle—living in a hut built on land she didn't own, facing constant hardship as she tried to feed her children. Before receiving her Berkeley-Darfur Stove in July, Atima spent hours each day cooking over a smoky fire and used half of her family's meager income to purchase firewood.

Over the past few weeks, the world's attention has been on Sudan as the South votes to secede from the North and become the world's newest nation. As the citizens of Southern Sudan are in the process of taking this giant step forward in their development, we must not forget the reason many Americans heard of Sudan: the war-ravaged western region of Darfur. I was in the region to help train our local partners how to conduct and analyze assessment surveys we use to better understand the stove's impact. I was impressed with what we found.

Fuel Scarcity in Darfur

Since 2003, conflict in Darfur has killed at least 300,000 people and forced more than 2 million people from their homes, many of whom now live in large camps spread through the region, which at 190 thousand square miles is approximately the size of Spain. Most Darfuri women cook over open fires fueled by wood that they gather themselves, with a pot resting on three stones. Finding the wood is a daily struggle. Although families in displacement camps receive food aid, they must still obtain their own fuel to cook it. Displaced women can walk up to 7 hours to find a single tree, risking assault every step of the way. To avoid danger, many Darfuri women purchase wood from middlemen, which requires them to sell the very food rations they need to feed their families. While the tangle of political and ethnic tensions underlying the Darfur conflict may seem beyond resolution, a partial solution to this one problem is clear: Women in Darfur need an efficient stove.

Low-Tech Fix: A Better Stove

The goal was to make a wood-burning stove that would use just a fraction of the fuel consumed by the open fires typically employed for cooking in Darfur. Each Berkeley-Darfur Stove is approximately 1 foot tall, and weighs 12 pounds. The stove has a tapered wind collar that increases fuel efficiency and is tailored to fit the round-bottomed pots ubiquitous in Darfur. Nonaligned air openings between the outer stove and an inner firebox accommodate the gusty winds that are common in Darfur and prevent too much airflow. The body, collar and feet of the stove are made of a sheet of mild steel weighing 5.5 pounds, while the firebox is made from stainless steel and the grate from cast iron. The whole stove can be assembled with 62 rivets.

Initially, the stoves were spot-welded by hand in Darfur. But to produce enough units to have an appreciable impact, and to ensure both high quality and low cost, we developed a way to mass-produce the stoves. Today, the stove design is stamped into flat sheets of metal in Mumbai and shipped to Darfur, where these "flat-kits" are assembled into stoves in a workshop that employs residents of a nearby displacement camp.

What began essentially as an engineering challenge—how to design an inexpensive, fuel-efficient stove that is tailored to conditions in Darfur—has gradually become a distribution challenge. With our partners, the humanitarian aid organization Oxfam America and a Sudanese nonprofit called Sustainable Action Group, we devise creative ways to market the stove to Darfuri women, train them to use it safely and efficiently, and collect data to better understand the impact we are having on the ground. Atima is one of approximately 15,000 women who have received a Berkeley-Darfur Stove. These women report saving an average of approximately $1 per day in firewood expenses: A $20 stove saves a Darfuri woman more than $300 per year, or $1500 over the stove's five-year life span. In a place where the average income is less than $5 a day (and most of this comes in the form of international aid), the impact of the stove is striking. We've made a good start, but we estimate that 400,000 women in Darfur would benefit from these stoves.

How to Help

To donate or learn more, visit darfurstoves.org.

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