Sustainable Stoves

Led by Sheba Ngoma

Sheba Ngoma is 37, a subsistence farmer and mother of six. For three years now, all her cooking has run on a rocket stove instead of an open charcoal fire. “It doesn’t require much firewood,” she says. “You can cook using only small twigs. Meals like Maheu and Nsima are finished in a very short time.”

Before: a smoke-filled kitchen and a shrinking forest

Before the stove, cooking meant toiling over an open fire and cutting down big trees for fuel. The kitchen, a mostly enclosed space, filled with smoke every time a meal was made, worse still in the rainy season. “We were coughing a lot,” Sheba says, “and my mother was not even able to help cook in the rainy season because of the smoke and her coughing.”

What changed with the stove

The rocket stove burns only small, dry twigs, no need to fell a tree for fuel. It reduces smoke by 70% when used well and uses only a third of the fuel a traditional fire needs. The heat goes straight to the pot instead of the air around it, so meals cook faster too, something Sheba noticed herself: nshima that used to take a long time over the fire is now ready much sooner.

“This stove is helping us reduce deforestation in our area and protect our environment,” Sheba says. “With these dry twigs, the smoke has decreased a lot, and now we can go in the kitchen without coughing so much. Even my mother has started cooking again.”

From one village to thousands of homes

The stoves, developed with Greenway, are two thirds more effective than a traditional charcoal fire: two litres of water boil in five to seven minutes, with 70% less smoke, using only small pieces of dead wood rather than whole trees. The distribution started in Mulendema and Kabulwebulwe chiefdom in 2020, and its success there prompted BLC to bring the stoves further afield, eventually reaching around 18,500 households from ten locations around Kafue National Park, with a further consignment of roughly 2,000 stoves brought to Simonga and Sinde near Livingstone.

A five-year monitoring programme with Greenway keeps track of how the stoves hold up, and the results so far are steady: daily use, few faults.

What it adds up to

Each stove in use reduces an estimated 2.4 tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions a year. Across the more than 20,000 stoves distributed, that is roughly 48,600 tonnes a year, comparable to the annual carbon footprint of over 5,000 Dutch citizens, or the equivalent of saving more than 48,600 trees over a hundred-year lifespan. For Sheba, the number that matters most is simpler: a kitchen her mother can stand in again.