What’s Cooking with the Institutional Stove Project?

Fred Colgan, Director of the Institutional Stove project, is in East Timor from 15 October – 12 November as part of an Aprovecho project with Mercy Corps and other NGOs.  Focused on exploring the possibilities of establishing stove production facilities -- including the Institutional Stove “factory-in-a-box” – the project is also looking into setting up a regional stove testing and development center in East Timor, the world’s youngest democracy.  More exciting still is East Timor’s selection by the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves  (GACC) as one of just four countries worldwide to serve as a model country in stove development.  Aprovecho will be a key participant in that conference, which will generate a lot of buzz in the stover community.

Nigeria is next on our itinerary (November 13-19).  There, the ISP will be revisiting and evaluating three institutional stoves installed last year at Bida Government Girl’s School in Niger State.  Here too prospects are promising for setting up a stove factory.  We will be onsite to attend the launch of the Nigerian Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, another of the four countries selected by the GACC to model improved cookstove development. One of our 60-liter stoves will be on hand at the opening ceremonies to demonstrate just how clean and efficient a stove can be! 

From Nigeria, it’s off to Darfur, where 200 institutional stoves were built and shipped as part of a World Food Program project earlier this year.  We will be supervising installations of the stoves in 100 schools, teaching cooks how to use the stoves, field testing, and teaching UN personnel all of the above.

To close out a busy year, the ISP will be traveling to Ethiopia, where 60 institutional stoves were purchased by the another United Nations refugee agency.  These stoves will go to refugee camps primarily serving famine-driven Somalis.

In January we travel to Kenya to demonstrate institutional stoves and our autoclave sterilizer to Catholic Relief Services, World Health Organization, UNICEF, and other international organizations. The former pastor and members of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic parish in Cottage Grove have made this project possible through their generous donations of more than $4500! 

Coming up next:  a first look at Timor Leste (“Where on earth is Timor Leste?”)