Month 23 ~ Potential Energy
Imagine having to put yourself at grave risk just to feed your family. Imagine the fear of being hours from safety with no hope of protection.
SO HERE IS A FEW LITTLE KNOWN FACTS FOR US TO TRY TO GET OUR HEADS AROUND ->
- 4 million people die each year from illness related to breathing smoke from cooking fires.
- This is 2x the number of people who died of AIDS in 2010 and
- 6x as many annual deaths as malaria.
- Cook fires in poorly ventilated homes cause more than 3 deaths per minute.
- Almost half of the world’s population cooks over inefficient open fires, causing devastation on forests and climate.
Why stoves? ...
A huge proportion of the world's population survive by cooking on primitive open fire stoves which is accompanied by multiple ecological and health problems. Production and distribution of energy efficient stoves goes a long way to solving many of the problems.
POOR HEALTH
A fire in the kitchen, if you’re cooking a meal, produces about the same pollution per hour in a typical house as a thousand cigarettes burning.
Women and children in developing countries are exposed each day to pollution from cooking smoke, up to 20 times the level recommended by the World Health Organization. Cook fires in poorly ventilated homes cause more than 3 deaths per minute. Exposure to cooking smoke leads to low birth weight, childhood pneumonia, tuberculosis, and a number of chronic illnesses.
POVERTY
Families pay as much as a third of their income to purchase fuel for cooking.
Cooking over open fires imposes high financial costs on families, especially the very poor, whose incomes of less than 2 dollars a day must be stretched to cover basic necessities.
Up to seven hours per day and 50% of a family’s income can be spent on collecting firewood, thus perpetuating poverty.
ENVIRONMENT
Cook fires cause deforestation and climate change.
Cook fires emit greenhouse gases laced with sunlight-absorbing black carbon, and hurry deforestation. Black carbon is the second greatest contributor to global warming, responsible for an estimated 18% of the Earth’s rising temperature.
Almost half of the world’s population cooks over inefficient open fires, causing devastation on forests and climate.
SAFETY
Women and girls face assault as they forage for fuel in conflict zones.
Finding wood to cook meals is a daily struggle for many women around the world. Women and girls must walk many hours, several times a week, just to find a single tree with usable wood to fuel their fires. Outside the relative safety of refugee camps, they are vulnerable to acts of violence.
How do stoves help? ...
Clean cookstoves save lives, create economic opportunity and combat climate change.
Designed to optimize fuel-efficiency and reduce toxic emissions when cooking meals, a clean cookstove is one intervention that addresses almost all of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals : ending poverty and hunger; gender equity; child health; maternal health; and environmental sustainability. For half the world’s population, a clean cookstove means one less day of struggling to find enough wood to survive. It means increased safety, better health, less harm to the environment, a higher income, more time and increased employment.
To learn more about the cookstove sector, please visit the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves.
BEYOND STOVES
In the long‐term Potential Energy will support a portfolio of clean technologies for the world’s poorest people using the same user-centered design and novel partnership approach that they have applied to their cookstove projects. They started with fuel-efficient cookstoves in Darfur. This is one spark. They now look, with our help, to ignite Potential Energy across the globe.
The story behind the stoves ...
This is where it all started ...
Type the title here ...
What to do now ...
To learn more about Trees, Water, People ...... CLICK HERE
To go directly to the donation page ...... CLICK HERE
Don't forget to anonymously tell us how much you gave
(by entering it in the box on the right at the top of the page)
so we know how we go toward our goal.
Kakenya Ntaiya was set to follow the traditional path of girls born in the small village of Enoosaen, Kenya. Engaged at the age of 5, she was to participate in a female circumcision ceremony as a young teenager and then be married. But she had a different plan. First, she negotiated with her father and willingly agree to be circumcised -- only if he would allow her to finish high school. Later, when she was accepted to Randolph Macon College in Viriginia, she negotiated with her village elders to do what no girl had ever done before: leave her village to go to college in the United States.
She didn’t leave forever, though. Deeply proud of her heritage and of her community, Ntaiya returned to the village after school and worked with her elders to establish a school for girls there. The Kakenya Center for Excellence was established in 2009 with 32 students. A primary grade boarding school just for girls, the curriculum focuses on academics, leadership and female empowerment, along with cultural preservation and life skills. While families that can afford tuition do, Ntaiya also works with donors to provide scholarships for others.
The Kakenya Center for Excellence
Core Subjects
Leadership Training
Confidence
