2021 WAS A YEAR OF INVESTMENT, CONTINUED INNOVATION, AND INCREDIBLE GROWTH FOR ALL OF OUR PARTNER PROJECTS.

• In Guatemala, we prepared for the launch of Maestros Comaleros (Master Stovebuilders), the next step in our commitment to empowering local people to provide their own solutions, and a crucial pilot project to test our capacity for expansion.

• In El Salvador, Gustavo Peña launched an initiative to build industrial stoves for wood-fired pupuserias while simultaneously managing the expansion of a pilot project to build Justa model stoves.

• In Nicaragua, Elida Olivas beat her 2020 stove production numbers with over 600 stoves for a wide variety of communities in need.

• And in Honduras, project leader Rossana Berganza provided Ecocina cookstoves for the village of San José las Lágrimas, where StoveTeam first provided stoves over 10 years ago.

A continued commitment to empower local solutions

This year we upheld our commitment to provide the assistance local people need in order to build stoves in their own communities. This approach gives local communities real ownership in the project – ensuring its success, longevity, and a program that is truly culturally sensitive and appropriate.

On a visit to our projects, StoveTeam’s Executive Director Shelby Kardas wrote the following account from San Martín Jilotepeque, Guatemala:

The men are sometimes surprised when we show up with women stove builders at their house. Yesterday we built a stove in a home where we met the father, mother, and 21 year old daughter of the house. As Eva and Bety set up to build the stove, the father said to Chato, “The women are going to build?” Chato said, “Yes, and Bety is my supervisor.” This came as a big surprise. During the entire process of building, the daughter sat on a chair and watched Eva and Bety work. I kept thinking that she must be inspired to see these two strong women working together outside a traditional role. 

Don’t take our word for it

Thanks to the generosity of the Meal a Day Fund and videographer Stephen Johnson, StoveTeam was able to produce new videos demonstrating our programs. Each of the short videos below shows the impact of our program in Guatemala from a different perspective.

Striving to meet an enormous need

We’re proud to have directly impacted almost 600,000 people to date, but we’re also focused on the estimated need for 20 million stoves across Central America. We believe that no family should have to sacrifice their health to cook a meal, so we spent 2021 working hard to position all four of our projects for maximum sustainability and growth. With the Justa stove pilot project in Guatemala, we are experimenting with a method to empower local people to operate more like independent contractors, building stoves on their own schedule, and finding communities with a need for stoves on their own. This approach, which is already working well for organizations we’re partnering with in Honduras, will allow StoveTeam to turn over as much of the stovebuilding process as possible to local people, minimizing our administrative costs and simplifying the process of expansion. This new program, called Maestros Comaleros, or Master Stovebuilders is launching at the beginning of 2022.

In 2021, we determined the first community to test this new approach: Nuevo Progreso, Guatemala. StoveTeam’s Guatemala Country Director Alex Eaton said:

Nuevo Progreso is a hidden gem, high in the hills near the northern border of Guatemala. Life is more relaxed compared to Guatemalan cities and life runs slower than other areas. Except for the cantinas, most places are closed by 8pm in the city center, whereas in the aldeas (towns), people are probably snoring by 8pm. There are so many different landscapes in this region; from cloud forests on the higher side to rubber forests on the lower, hotter sides. The communities work hard to keep themselves safe from outside danger and crime through a community-wide watch system.

Investments in StoveTeam’s longterm impact

StoveTeam International is in a chapter of innovation and growth with a goal to create a more sustainable, local impact across all our project locations in Central America and in 2021, we invested in this future. We believe this evolution will result in a more impactful, entrepreneurship-focused and adoption-based path forward. With the installation and evaluation of roughly 700 Justa stoves over the last year, and over 900 Ecocina and Institutional stoves placed in three other locations, 2021 was a year of adoption studies, stove modification tests, and evaluation. Through this process, our stovebuilding teams developed a deep foundation of knowledge and skills.

Carbon offsets

This year, StoveTeam’s Program Director Mike Hatfield began the process to certify StoveTeam to sell carbon credits generated by our stoves’ carbon savings. We expect to complete certification in 2022, providing sustainable funding to reinvest in the placement of more stoves and the maintenance of existing stoves. Mike said:

After close to 15 years in the field and more than 79,000 fuel-efficient stoves distributed, StoveTeam knew its impact in terms of CO2 reductions were significant. In 2021 we started the meticulous process of third-party verification of these reductions via the largest carbon validator in the world, Verra (or The Verified Carbon Standard). This process has not only validated that our stoves have a huge impact on carbon reductions, it also has given us a more robust framework to conduct all of our stove placement with long term success and verification of true impact at the core.

Education and data collection

During 2021, we developed a robust follow-up, monitoring and evaluation program where stovebuilders revisit homes to educate recipients on proper stove use and maintenance, ensure stove adoption and functioning, and the complete replacement of open-fire cooking with safe and efficient stove usage.

Central to this process is a comprehensive digital data collection system implemented in 2020 and expanded in 2021, based on the platform Open Data Kit (ODK). This year, StoveTeam was proud to become the first partner organization adopted by the University of Nebraska Omaha (UNO) Economics department’s Experiential Learning initiative. We are now collaborating with UNO to expand and improve our use of ODK to collect and analyze our program data.

Stove design

We are dedicated to the philosophy that stove recipients’ wants and needs must inform our designs and approaches. To test our Justa cookstove design for Guatemala, we assembled three cooks from the town of Santiago Zamora to test a series of modified stoves and give us their opinions. We learned that cooks desire the option of a slightly larger plancha (griddle cooktop) - 16” x 32” rather than our standard 16” by 24.” Taking these results into account, as of early 2022 we will be offering two Justa stove sizes to families in Nuevo Progreso.

Raising awareness

Around the world, four billion people lack access to safe cooking, resulting in four millions deaths each year, yet almost no one talks about this issue. It’s estimated that clean cooking receives less than 1% of the support needed to address it on a global scale. As a result, we see raising awareness as a key and important part of our mission, because we recognize that we will never be able to tackle this issue on the scale it deserves alone.

Special thanks to...

StoveTeam’s incredible growth this year is thanks to the support of hundreds of donors, but we want to take a moment to thank some who went the extra mile to ensure our programs continue no matter what. This year we are proud to have been supported by grants from the Christadelphian Meal a Day Fund, Good Works Institute, The RoundHouse Foundation, The Delaney-Oxley Family Fund of Triangle Community Foundation and Rotary clubs from all over the country!

We are thrilled that our major donor program The Fire Continues to grow!

StoveTeam would like to thank the following monthly donor “Embers” and members of the fire:

A powerful new partnership

A volunteer organization, even when travel is impossible

Despite being unable to offer our usual volunteer trips to help build stoves in Central America, StoveTeam is still proud to be supported by a team of incredible volunteers who logged over 700 hours this year, assisting with our programs, fundraising and general operations.

In addition, we were thrilled to see our board of directors grow this year, adding three new directors from diverse backgrounds, each bringing something special to our team.