Creatable – Rocket Stove

We needed to find engaging, relevant and reproducible STEM projects for the Burundi high-school students to engage with. It needed to be an experience that might inspire an entrepreneurial spirit and promote positive change in communities. At the same time, we had to be incredibly empathetic about the realities of life in the world's poorest nation. Limited access to materials and technology meant we needed to be considerate and inventive in how to teach the fundamental principles of innovation. We needed to highlight the impact these skills can bring by solving real problems that these young people face every day.

According to the WHO, smoke inhalation, caused by inefficient home-cooking devices, causes 4.3 million premature deaths every year, making it one of the most lethal environmental health risks worldwide. As such, we designed and tested a more efficient cooking fire that could be efficiently built out of the materials available to the people of Burundi. The Rocket Stove. We designed and illustrated a textbook for students and a handbook for teachers to teach the core principles of the stove with instructions on how to create one themselves. This was then translated into French as the Burundi language of choice.

The Rocket Stove has been taught to thousands of young Burundians who have built and are using Rocket Stoves in their homes. One entrepreneurial group of students from the pilot program have created a business, making and selling rocket stoves for all the houses in their village. This course has been officially implemented in the Burundi curriculum. The second-order impact of this course has been incredible to witness. The wide adoption of the rocket stove in student homes, which use far less firewood, has meant that students who used to skip school to fetch firewood, no have to do so.

Confidential: We are working with Creatable and UNICEF on a second program that focuses on alternative farming methodologies that students can experiment with at home and ultimately scale up to mass food production as well as new programs for other nations.