2007 Updates
(Updates are purposely delayed by 4-6 weeks from the end of each month)
December
In December, project donations took off as stove donations became a favorite Christmas gift. Instead of slowing down for the holidays, we stepped up our engineering efforts to hit the new year running! We received donated material to produce 50 flat kits based on our new design and began cutting out the stoves. These kits will be assembled with tools available in Darfur, allowing us to test and tweak the new design, as well as to produce detailed and easy-to-use assembly instructions. The kits will travel to Darfur where they can be used to establish the best in-country production strategy, along with a new assembly video that can be shown to potential assemblers. We continue to explore design improvements on the stove. We look forward to a promising and fruitful new year!
November
In November, Ashok Gadgil was featured on the KMAX Good Day Sacramento Program demonstrating the Darfur Stove. To view the broadcast, go to CBS 13 Video Library and search for "Darfur." Select the segment "Scientist demonstrates the Darfur Stove." The broadcast gives a nice visual representation of the amount of wood saved just from one meal. In November, we also began to see an increase in project donations as numerous people chose to gives stoves to IDP families in the name of a loved one as holiday gifts. As we prepare for an exciting new year, we have been busy working on the details of our mass production and dissemination strategies, as well as forging new partnerships in Sudan. Stories continue to come in of families in Darfur who have improved their lives with money saved and risk averted due to the Berkeley Darfur Stove, making this our most rewarding holiday season yet!
October
Ashok Gadgil and Christina Galitsky win a 2007 Breakthrough Award from Popular Mechanics magazine.
In October, Ashok Gadgil and Christina Galitsky were awarded a 2007 Breakthrough Award by Popular Mechanics Magazine for the design of the Berkeley Darfur Stove! This story has a full page of coverage in the November 2007 issue of Popular Mechanics. Ashok accepted the award in New York City on behalf of the Darfur Stoves Project . A short video and article featuring the Berkeley Darfur Stove can be found at the Popular Mechanics web site.
We have also continued to solicit private donations through fundraising presentations and our website, www.darfurstoves.org. In addition we have been busy researching different dissemination and distribution models for our stoves. On the engineering side, we have started development of a flat kit design for stove manufacture, similar to the one deployed by Ikea for many of their products. This should ease stove assembly close to the point of distribution.
September
The Hunger Site Joins Us as a Partner! We are thrilled to report that The Hunger Site's online catalog, Gifts that Give More, has a new gift. For $20 The Hunger Site's customers can underwrite a stove for a family in Darfur. The Hunger Site has been very gracious in covering all the transaction costs so that every penny of the $20 goes to The Darfur Stoves Project. When a stove is purchased, the purchaser gets a beautiful certificate — a GREAT holiday gift. We hope you'll have the opportunity to check it out (and maybe buy a stove as a stocking stuffer)! You can see the stove gift at the Hunger Site Shop.
If the above link does not work, go to http://shop.thehungersite.com/
- Enter 'Stoves' in the search field in the left-hand column
- Select 'High-Efficiency Stoves for Darfur Refugees'
August
In August, the Darfur Stoves Project was featured in several Bay area newscasts, including ABC channel 7 and NBC channel 11. The newscasts focused on the ability of our small stove that costs so little to alleviate suffering for so many. Both newscasts were very well received and we are happy to report a corresponding spike in donations! The ABC newscast is posted on their national website along with a link to donate money to the project. NBC 11 also featured a link to our project on their Featured Links site after the story aired.
We have also successfully completed our commitment with CHF International. CHF will take over the pilot production facility we built for them, and the stove manufacturers trained by us are currently working on building stoves. Different perspectives on quality control and on the necessity to improve the design from ongoing feedback from the field have led to an amicable parting of ways. We strongly believe that successful implementation of hundreds of thousands of units of fuel-efficient stoves requires continuous feedback and quality control — far beyond what one can acheive through feedback from the technical rollout alone. Producing lesser-quality stoves does not address the problems in Darfur in an optimal manner. We are moving forward by looking for a good match among several NGOs that share our appreciation of good engineering practices. That said, we wish CHF the very best going forward.
July
An IDP woman with her child cooks on a Berkeley Darfur Stove, built locally in Darfur under Michael Helm's direction.
Photo copyright: Michael Helms.
After returning from Darfur, Michael Helms extensively debriefed the team on his observations and experience. We are actively incorporating Michael's observations and the most recent IDP feedback into our stove design as well as in the design for stove production workshops run by IDPs in Darfur.
June
Our second visiting professional engineer to Darfur, Michael Helms, spent the full month of June in Darfur and returned to the Bay Area in July 2007. Michael made major advances in June. More than 100 new stoves went into the field, including our first distribution at Kalma camp in South Darfur, and are now being used every day by IDPs. Four more spot-welding machines and sheet-metal bending machines (called "brakes") from America reached Michael in Darfur in June. Some were damaged in transport, but he made minor repairs and got them all working again. This increased the capacity of our on-site workshop for construction of Berkeley Darfur Stoves ("BDS"). In addition, over 4000 completed and extremely durable cast iron grates arrived in from Khartoum ready to be inserted into new stoves. These events represent a great push forward for the mass production of BDS stoves by the internally displaced persons ("IDPs") who are trained to build the stoves eventually within their own camps! For now, the pilot workshop is in a shed in the city of Nyala, near the camps.
Based on close observation of actual cooking taking place in the camps, Michael devised improvements to the stove that provide high stability during vigorous stirring. He also identified a set of methods to prevent the raw, untreated sheet metal used in the BDS from rusting over months of use. For example, IDPs can coat the stove once with a thin layer of cooking oil (which will harden as the stove gets hot). During Michael's efforts over the last month, we have also identified some of the critical areas of support needed to make this project a success and are working to procure that support in the future. Michael has paved the way nicely for our next VIP!
May
A spot welder (center) and other tools brought to Darfur by Michael Helms in the pilot workshop for local manufacture of the Berkeley Darfur Stove in Darfur.
In May, our intern Michael Helms successfully set up a workshop for the local manufacture of the Berkeley Darfur Stove (BDS) in Nyala, Sudan (the capital of South Darfur) using the hundreds of pounds of equipment he brought from America. Michael succeeded in getting all of the equipment shipped to Nyala, and then to work well and efficiently in the workshop, enabling our first test of Darfur manufacture to begin (the earlier batch of stoves were built in Khartoum).
The local IDPs as well as the CHF staff remarked how quiet and well organized the workshop functioned, compared to the noise and bustle they saw in local workshops in the town. A functioning workshop is great step forward for our project! Michael reports that the next step will be a few iterations of redesign, the building of a few stoves, and the testing of those stoves by the IDPs. Then we will have a mature design of the Berkeley Darfur Stove in Darfur ready for production in quantities of hundreds and then thousands of units.
A local worker builds stability feet for the Berkeley Darfur Stove in the pilot workshop in Darfur.
In addition, a comparison test of the BDS along with five other wood stoves, each of a different design, and also a three-stone-fire was conducted in Nyala on May 15th by Action Contre la Faim (ACF). The test used IDP cooks and IDP food, making it very close to conditions in the field. The cooks were not trained by us or ACF. We are very pleased to report that the BDS stove showed the best performance, using the least amount of wood to cook the staple foods of the IDPs — mulah and assida. In fact, some of the local Sudanese staff who participated in the test were so impressed that they requested a BDS stove for their homes as soon as possible!
Finally, in May we began our search for the next VIP intern that will travel to Darfur to take the place of Michael Helms. Michael has done a tremendous job and we have come a long way, but many tasks remain for the new intern to complete.
April
In April, Michael Helms, with help from CHF-Sudan, has started with an assessment of the work done so far and the resources on hand to advance the work further. He had brought with him several hundred pounds of engineering equipment to manufacture the stoves — some of which arrived late, and some arrived damaged, but he repaired and got all pieces working right. He also procured several additional pieces of manufacturing equipment in Khartoum after researching local manufacturing conditions. Then Michael Helms traveled to Darfur to set up facilities for stove production in Darfur, and train local IDPs in stove production.
On arriving in Darfur, Michael Helms met with local CHF staff to discuss their assessments of the first 50 prototype stoves that had been distributed to IDPs in November 2006. CHF interviewers reported that women using the stoves saved significant amounts of firewood. The IDP women also reported that the food cooked faster and tasted better when prepared in the new stove. The BDS (Berkeley Darfur Stove) design provides a cleaner, hotter fire, transfers more heat to the cooking pot, and uses less wood than the traditional three-stone cooking fire used by IDPs. Mr. Helms visited local businesses to assess availability of tools and materials, and made his first visit to a camp to observe how the stoves from the initial 50 technical trial are being used. He is now working with the stove design team in Berkeley to improve the stove's stability, simplify its manufacture, and reduce total cost of stove production.
Michael and our colleagues in CHF as well as Berkeley are acutely aware that this is not a purely engineering project. Much effort remains to be devoted to the development, testing and completion of a social marketing strategy for the stoves, for imparting and reinforcing training in use of the stove, and for partial cost recovery.
February-March
The project achieved a major goal with the arrival of a mechanical engineer in Sudan. Michael Helms, VIP (Visiting International Professional) traveled to Khartoum with several hundred pounds of tools and materials. Mr. Helms brought equipment with him to set up a metal stove factory. The simple, rugged tools will cut, bend and spot-weld the sheet metal used to make the stoves.
January
The latest design of the Berkeley Darfur Stove,taking into account feedback from the technical rollout.
In January we worked hard preparing to send our second engineering intern to Sudan. We gave several fundraising talks to various groups in the Bay area. We worked in December and January to develop documentation to qualify to add our project to the GlobalGiving website. This allows for easy online donations (see http://www.globalgiving.com/1632)
Next page—2006 Updates
