Improved Cookstove Factory in Lira, Uganda

Is your stove killing you? That’s not a frivolous question. Three billion people around the world are using coal or wood-burning stoves that can cause fatal lung diseases to feed their families. The smoke is full of toxins known and contributes to indoor air pollution. People of all ages are affected. Killer stoves are the norm in places where modern appliances don’t exist or are unaffordable. People make do with what’s available to them because what’s the alternative?

 Meet Burn Design Lab. It’s just what it sounds like: this USA-based group designs clean cookstoves and gets them to people through local networks overseas. The stoves are produced in Lira, Uganda, at the International Lifeline Fund’s Improved Cookstove Factory. Upgrades to the factory would triple production, allowing 15,000 durable, affordable, stoves to go out each month. The big goal: getting stoves to 50,000,000 families by 2027. 

Ending the premature deaths caused by indoor air pollution is a worthy goal in itself, yet the project has even more benefits for the local population in the form of new jobs. Rural Ugandans—44 women and 81 men—get steady work.

Burn Design Lab will use our grant to procure a circle shear—a piece of manufacturing equipment to upgrade the machine that cuts the stove’s top face. Sounds technical, but it’s simple: better appliances, good home cooking, no pollution.