Fireless Cookers

A fireless cooker is an insulated basket that continues to cook pre-heated food, reducing the cooking time on a 3-stone fire or improved cookstove. Households with a fireless cooker use much less fuel, saving time and money. Fireless cookers are simple to make and long-lasting.

The benefits of fireless cookers include:

Saving the family money and time spent buying or collecting charcoal or firewood.
Improving safety for women and children – gathering firewood is a task that often falls to women and children, and as the amount of firewood available locally declines they have to travel further from home, placing themselves in danger.
Reducing deforestation rates in the local area – less demand for firewood and charcoal means forested areas have more chance to recover and regrow.

Designing a project

To quantify the carbon emissions savings from providing fireless cookers in a community, it is necessary to establish what the “business as usual” or “before we started” situation is. We do this by using a baseline survey of a representative sample of the community that will be receiving the cookers.

You can download and read our complete methodology below.

Weighing firewood - Uganda

Fireless cookers are easy to make - Uganda

A typical cookstove - Uganda

Baseline

The baseline survey is key to both the success and viability of a project. To claim emissions reductions, we need to be able to prove that the introduction of a fireless cooker will lead to households using less wood or charcoal, and consequently reducing their carbon emissions.

Once we identify a project area, we must find out about the types and quantities of fuel community members are using.

We gather information about fuel usage by asking households to show how much wood they typically use in a day or week for all of their household needs. The surveyor uses a portable scale to weigh the fuel. The surveyor knows or comes from the community they are working in and they can “sanity check” the information.

Once we have data about household size and fuel usage, we estimate the average carbon emissions savings from giving a household a fireless cooker. If we know the expected carbon savings over the lifetime of a fireless cooker (usually about five years), and the cost of construction, training, and ongoing support, we can see whether we have a viable carbon offset project.

Monitoring

Once the households begin using the fireless cookers, our partners carry out regular monitoring surveys to make sure that the cookers are in good condition and being used regularly and correctly.

In addition, our partners go back and measure the fuel used in households, and compare this with the baseline scenario, to ensure that the claimed emissions reductions are being achieved.

Making a Successful Project

The most important part of any project is the people who are involved.

The households that receive a fireless cooker need to understand the purpose of the project and to be committed to using the cooker as part of their routine cooking.

The project partner needs to be committed to the people in the communities they are working with and able to respond to the particular demands of a carbon offsetting project.

One of the key demands is time – our carbon calculations assume that the fireless cookers will last for at least five years. The project partner needs to take responsibility for the project for its whole life to achieve the carbon emissions savings estimated at the start of the project.

Designing a project

Baseline

Monitoring

Making a Successful Project

The Projects

Climate Stewards - For people and planet