The actual difference your $15 will make
By: Arielle Moinester, WEA Program Strategist
Throughout the #WEAWorldFoodDayGiveaway, we’ve been sharing stories and raising awareness about our Nigeria Women’s Clean Cookstoves Project, and the opportunity to donate $15 to cover the cost of a cookstove for a woman to launch her own clean energy business. In partnership with Women’s Initiative for Sustainable Environment (WISE), we’re excited to be launching this project and ensuring that families in Kaduna State, Nigeria have the chance to breathe healthier air, reduce deforestation, increase household savings, improve health and safety, and transform their sense of personal and community empowerment.
This World Food Day, it’s crucial that we recognize that healthy communities depend not only on healthy food, but on healthy cooking. If a woman in Nigeria cooks breakfast, lunch and dinner over a wood fire, she suffers the equivalent of smoking between 3 and 20 packets of cigarettes a day. Over 93,000 Nigerians (mostly women and children) die annually from inhalation of firewood smoke from indoor cooking (not to mention the deforestation that is destroying regions and increasing climate instability). This project will train women leaders in Nigeria to promote and sell clean cookstoves, reducing these threats overall. In our #WEAWorldFoodDayGiveaway, we invite people to donate $15 to cover the cost of one cookstove for a family.
But it doesn’t stop there.
WEA and WISE are committed to ensuring that families in Kaduna State have access to clean cookstoves not only during this one year project, but for years to come. That’s why our model is designed to scale and sustain access to clean cookstoves and community awareness beyond the life of the project.
In order to achieve this, 30 women will participate in a three-part training, including leadership, entrepreneurship, and clean cookstove technology. The women will participate in the trainings in 15 pairs and will be selected through an application process starting in the next two weeks that will conclude at the end of November. Graduates of the trainings will receive grants to start their clean cookstove businesses. This is where your $15 contributions come in! Each donation of $15 covers the cost of one cookstove. Grants of $500 for each team are designed to cover the cost of entrepreneurs’ first 20 cookstoves, as well as transportation, marketing, and demonstration events. Furthermore, WEA and WISE will also support the entrepreneur pairs to link to micro-finance institutions. Within the year, each entrepreneur pair is expected to reach approximately 90 families with clean cookstoves—including training families on how to use and maintain them—thereby reaching a total of 13,000 people within one year.
Olanike Olugboji (center), Founder and Director of WISE, distributing cookstoves to women in Kaduna State, Nigeria. Photo: WISE
In order for women and their families to adopt clean cookstoves, it’s critical that they understand the life-threatening importance of replacing traditional cookstoves, and see positive changes in their own communities. Through participation in community trainings, public demonstrations, networking events, and advocacy campaigns, women will increase their capacity and confidence to be social, ecological, and economic leaders in their families and communities for adoption of clean, safe cookstoves.
Let’s do this!
Join the #WEAWorldFoodDayGiveaway here, and support women entrepreneurs in Nigeria. Your $15 will cover the cost of one clean cookstove, and will enter you to win fabulous prizes from some of our favorite sustainable brands.