What! No Rocket Stove?
When I shared a video about our stove project with Permaculture Magazine’s Maddy Harland, she noted that many readers would wonder why we are championing a basic clay stove design, rather than the far more efficient ‘rocket stove’ technology. It’s an insightful question. The answer is a bit of a long story because it goes right to the root of some big problems with international development. I’ll get to that, but first I want to explain why this particular stove is so special.
Wood and charcoal make up 90% of the energy consumed on Pemba Island, Tanzania [1]. This poses some serious challenges for Pembans because their small island is already severely deforested.
What’s worse, the traditional cooking technique across Pemba is the ‘three-stone’ method (exactly what it sounds like, an open fire surrounded by three stones to hold a grill or a cooking pot). This practice is very inefficient — consuming an excessive amount of Pemba’s scarce wood fuels — and contributes to respiratory ailments due to imperfect combustion.
When Community Forests International decided to tackle this issue, I actually had visions of rocket stoves and top-loading updraft gasifiers myself. I’m a typical permaculture enthusiast – the gasifiers would produce biochar and therefore stack functions — but as our project unfolded we realized that these solutions, although technologically superior, were not necessarily the best solutions. How could we be sure that people would actually use the new stoves? Would they rob Pemban food of its signature charcoal flavour? Messing with people’s cuisine shouldn’t be taken lightly — especially when you’re trying to win friends and make change.
The answer ended up coming from a local woman, someone who knew how to build a new type of clay stove and was willing to share her knowledge. All she needed was a platform. We supported the initial dissemination using a ‘train-the-trainer’ model and then sat back to watch as clay stoves spread virally across the island.
The initial 20 women we trained went on to train an additional 120 stove-makers in their home communities. Collectively this cohort built over 600 stoves in a matter of months! We soon lost count as stoves started popping up in communities we’d never even worked with. You know you’ve hit on a genuine solution when it quickly grows its own legs and no longer needs to be propped up.
Hands down, rocket stoves are more efficient than these clay stoves but these clay stoves are still heads and shoulders above the three-stone method, and have a lot of other winning qualities as well. They are so low-tech that literally anyone can build them. They are light and portable, lending the same flexibility of the three stone method.
Most importantly, because this solution came from a Pemban woman, it naturally meshed with the intricacies of the local culture and environment. It’s a Pemban solution, and therefore far more appropriate and durable than anything we could come up with as outsiders — no matter how well intentioned.
Development is ‘broken’
I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that
development is broken. By development I mean the way that the Global North has gone about ‘lifting’ people out of poverty around the word for the last 60-odd years. It just isn’t working. According to Jason Hickel of the London School of Economics, the gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen and poverty continues to grow at an unsettling pace, with approximately 500 million people added to the ‘extremely poor’
since 1981.
The good news is that there are some really positive solutions emerging, many of which would be familiar to the permaculture practitioner solutions based on earth care, people care and fair share. These solutions turn the traditional development model on its head and challenge the long-held assumption that answers come from the top down, from the outside, and from the West.
When it comes to development, we can turn a popular permaculture principle on its head as well. In this case it’s not that ‘the problem is the solution’, but the solution, quite literally, is the problem. By forcing Western development ideas and answers on the non-Western world in an attempt to help, we have been undermining people’s basic agency: their ability to create their own opportunity. We have prevented them from innovating their own solutions and lifting themselves out of poverty.
The Solution
Never do anything for people that they can do for themselves. - Ernesto Cortes
It’s sort of like the old ‘teach a man to fish’ proverb — or better yet ‘teach a woman to permaculture’ — but with an important twist. Because handouts are not the only problem, it’s also the assumption that the giver knows what’s best for the recipient in the first place. The solution is to put the most vulnerable people in a position of leadership and to recognize the unmatched knowledge that they have of their own cultural and environmental context. This approach addresses root causes rather than just symptoms, and lays the foundation for respect, trust and durable change.
The Future
I hope that one day rocket stoves, or some other superior green cooking technology, do become prevalent across Pemba because there is such a strong need and we can always do better. For now though, the clay stoves are like a bridge technology, helping to foster a culture of user-led innovation that is far more valuable than the sum of its technical parts.
We want to demonstrate how effective development can be when you listen to the people who need it most. What other hopeful innovations might communities living on the front lines of scarcity and climate change offer to the world?
Community Forests International has constructed a Rural Innovation Campus on Pemba Island devoted entirely to piloting and demonstrating grassroots solutions. To learn more about this initiative please visit us at www.forestsinternational.org
[1] National Climate Change Strategy. United Republic of Tanzania Vice President’s Office — Division of Environment. 2012 (pp.15).
This article was originally published in Permaculture Magazine’s print edition, issue #87 pp. 51–54, 01/2016.
