My Nonprofit Reviews

A Rocket What??

You may never have heard of a rocket stove. I certainly hadn’t. I’m not a backpacker or survivalist. It wasn’t part of our home emergency kit. Then, about a year ago, one of our former students from long-ago Peace Corps Liberia days asked us to help support a rocket stove initiative to offer villagers a cleaner, safer cooking alternative that will help reduce pollution and save forests from being cut down for charcoal. I said, “I’m there!”

Village Improvement Project, http://www.vipinc.org/, which was already providing free solar lanterns to schoolchildren in small Liberian villages, was now launching an initiative using the social enterprise model to produce rocket stoves in Liberia and sell them at as low a cost as possible. The rocket stove's simple design means that it is so efficient that only a small amount of fuel such as twigs and discarded wood chips is needed to cook a meal.

In Liberia, many women sell bowls of rice and greens by the side of the road to support themselves and their families. These women could save the cost of the rocket stove many times over since they would no longer be dependent on costly charcoal or kerosene. This would mean more money going directly to a better life for their children.

These women work very hard to just scrape by. If by giving seed money to get the rocket stove initiative up and going, I can offer them a chance to have a better life and help save the Liberian forests as well, then, “I’m there!”