Marian Stove Project
The majority of rural homes in the Rukwa region cook on 3-stone fires.
These fires are often moved inside the home, or into an adjacent cooking shed, to avoid weather. The women who cook on these stoves are subjected to dangerous smoke from the wood, which is often wet or green. The need to move from three stone fires to more efficient bio-mass cooking stoves is well established and a global initiative to promote efficient bio-mass stoves is advanced by the World Health Organization and other large NGO’s.
The senior leadership at the Rukwa Foundation was introduced to this need by Ed Keane, who has worked on family cooking stove projects in the region since 2015. The Marian Stove Project is an ongoing effort to use Ed Keane’s stove design in the Rukwa region. The stove team that Ed & his friend, Gabriel Lupasha, trained have been producing stoves out of the Holy Spirit Parish house in Malangali for some time. From this temporary location, the teams built well over 170 stoves in village homes and another 7 larger industrial stoves in school settings.
The Rukwa Foundation intends to partner with the Marian Stove Building team to scale up their activities and provide them a more permanent base for production of the stoves at a scale that would have a large impact on health in the region.
