Stoves Protect Health and Environment in Central America
Why a Stove?
A SHARE stove is an an intervention that helps alleviate rural poverty and improves health and quality of life for rural women and their families in communities where SHARE works. Women can cook meals more efficiently allowing them to participate in a SHARE literacy circle or in a small agriculture enterprise.
The benefits to family health and the environment are immense; the cost savings significant, the time-savings important and the empowerment of the 
poor rural women is “transformational”.
“No more tears in my kitchen,” said one grateful recipient of a new SHARE stove in Guatemala.
Indeed, this indoor air pollution has been called “the killer in the kitchen.”
The World Health Organization (WHO) recognizes pollution from open fire pits as a significant health risk killing 1.6 million people a year and causing chronic illness in many more. However, open cooking fires using wood are the common cooking method in rural homes in Central and South America where families cannot afford other fuel.
The walls in homes are dark with soot and the indoor air quality is dangerous and causes eye and lung disease in rural women and upper respiratory disease in young children. Children may stumble and fall on the fires and suffer burns.
A SHARE stove reduces health risk to women and children and improves the environment. The new stoves are made of cement blocks and mortar forming a wood-burning chamber and have a chimney that removes the toxic smoke.
These stoves use half the amount of wood; this means cutting down fewer trees and less time spent hunting for wood. In countries with great rural poverty and deforested hillsides subject to erosion and landslides during the rainy season, reducing the use of wood is a priority.
These Stoves Change Lives
One woman said she could get up an hour later, at 5 a.m. each morning to prepare her husband’s food before he headed to the fields because the beans and tortillas cooked much faster on her new stove. “I can store all the wood I need for a week indoors where it doesn’t get wet,” said one pleased cook who lives on a Salvadoran mountaintop. In one stove project in Honduras two women shared one new stove. One happy stove recipient who has a large family said she could cook 10 tortillas at one time on the new stove surface and boil water all at the same time.
Women testify that their lives have been “transformed”.
Families haul the cement and sand up steep hills, carry cement blocks and assist the trained local mason to construct their new stoves. Community meetings are used to inform about the benefits of the program. In some communities stove building is connected to a tree planting project. When recipients are trained in stove maintenance these stoves will last for years making a difference in the lives of the rural poor.