Clean Cooking for Households in Kenya

Across rural Kenya, millions of households still cook over smoky three-stone fires or basic charcoal stoves, burning through firewood, driving deforestation, and filling homes with health-damaging smoke that causes diseases like pneumonia, stroke, and lung cancer. This project puts a better solution directly into their kitchens: the Kuniokoa, an efficient firewood cookstove whose technology was designed and developed by BURN, and whose design takes into account the local cooking culture in the project area to ensure that improvements in technology and improved standards of living do not come at the expense of cultural traditions. The stoves are produced by the biggest manufacturer of highly efficient improved cookstoves in Sub-Saharan Africa, producing all its stoves in the first and only modern cookstove manufacturing facility in Kenya, and carbon finance subsidizes the end-user price, making the stove affordable, with prices potentially falling further as more carbon credits are sold. Since the first stove was distributed in November 2022, a total of 117,267 stoves have been distributed and over 105,000 are confirmed in active use, each one cutting smoke exposure, saving households money on fuel, and easing pressure on Kenya's forests.