Why Cooking Affects the Health of 4 Billion People Worldwide and How StoveTeam International Works to Solve It

PORTLAND, Ore., Dec. 16, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Roughly half of the world still uses dangerous indoor fires to cook their daily meals. The smoke from these fires kills four million people every year, mostly women and children. And yet, despite this enormous scale, it is estimated that the issue of open-fire cooking is addressed at less than one percent of the scale needed to solve it by 2030. Today though, there are a handful of organizations working to tackle this problem around the world, like Oregon nonprofit StoveTeam International.

13 years ago, grandmother Nancy Hughes lost her husband to cancer and volunteered in the kitchen of a medical team working in Guatemala. She saw babies with lungs choked from smoke inhalation, women with chronic lung disease, and children with debilitating burns. The cause? Cooking over indoor open fires. Hughes formed StoveTeam, an organization that empowers Central American communities to manage their own stove-building projects. Hughes says,

"The most dangerous activity a woman in the developing world can undertake is cooking for her family, and most of them have a baby on the front or a baby on the back. For that baby, it's equivalent to smoking three packs of cigarettes per day."

Today, projects started by StoveTeam have provided stoves for over half a million people across Central America. Each stove completely eliminates smoke inside the home, benefiting an average family of five to eight people, while saving 15 tons of CO2 (carbon dioxide) from entering the atmosphere. The $100 cost of each stove is covered by donations received by StoveTeam, and each stove's CO2 savings even allow donors to become "carbon neutral" by offsetting the climate impacts of driving their car, heating their home, or flying in a plane.

Local stove builder Betty Hernández says, "I am grateful because I get to show the world that I can change my life, improve my economy, and give the best for my son."

StoveTeam's Executive Director, Shelby Kardas says that this project is also tackling the root causes of immigration, "StoveTeam's role is to help local people create their own stove-building projects. We're helping to provide jobs in areas of Central America that need them the most."

To learn more or to help provide a stove, visit stoveteam.org

Contact: Forest Resener, [email protected]

SOURCE StoveTeam International