Tempus
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Tidskriften
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By Barrett Sheridan
Newsweek
July 16, 2007 issue - As for so many of us, the genocide in Darfur
was merely an abstraction to Ashok Gadgil, a scientist at the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. But in September
2004 he got a call from the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Could Gadgil design a screw press for Darfurians, the caller asked,
so they could turn their garbage into biofuel pellets? "I
quickly showed him that there is not enough kitchen waste in home
cooking to produce much worthwhile fuel," the physicist says,
and USAID dropped the idea. But the problem continued to nag at
him. Eventually Gadgil decided that if he couldn't redesign the
fuel, he would redesign the stove.
The violence in Darfur has not only left at least 200,000 dead
but devastated the already arid landscape. More than 2 million
people now fill groaning refugee camps; as they hunt farther and
wider for firewood, they are denuding whole swaths of the countryside.
Gathering firewood can now mean a seven-hour round trip, during
which women risk rape and mutilation at the hands of the Janjaweed
militias that lurk in wait. (Men can't make the trip in their
stead—they'll simply be killed.) A fact-finding visit to
the region in late 2005 brought home the problem's urgency to
Gadgil. "A huge majority of people were missing at least
one meal a week because they did not have fuel to cook with,"
he says. In a sick Catch-22, many families were selling some of
their food in exchange for the wood to cook it with.
Gadgil, a 56-year-old Mumbai native, had experience developing
simple, life-saving technology. One of his patents—a cheap
method for disinfecting waterusing ultraviolet light—led
to a successful business start-up in 1996. The resulting company,
WaterHealth International, now provides affordable clean water
for more than 1 million people in the developing world. After
returning from Darfur, Gadgil worked with lab colleagues and students
at UC Berkeley to modify an existing Indian stove for Darfurians'
needs. "Cook stoves, although they look simple, are very
complex creatures," he says, "which is why you can't
simply sit in Berkeley and say, 'Well, this is the stove for you'."
While the Indian stove excelled at producing low-intensity heat
for cooking rice, for instance, Darfurians needed a high-powered
flame for sautéing onions, garlic and okra, ingredients
in their staple dish, mulah. And since most families cook outside,
the stove also needed to cope with the region's strong winds.
The result of their efforts is the Berkeley-Darfur stove (darfurstoves.org), a hollow drum that looks like a cross between a lunar landing craft and a stop sign. Designed with a smooth airflow to fuel the fire and an upper rim that fits snugly with different-size pots, the stove requires 75 percent less wood than an open fire, and a wind collar makes for a steady flame. That means fewer risky trips outside the camp. And those who now pay for firewood, Gadgil estimates, could save as much as $200 a year, which could be used instead for luxuries like new clothing and fresh meat.
The next step is mass production. Gadgil and his partners in Berkeley have teamed with two nonprofits, Engineers Without Borders and CHF International, to set up workshops in Sudan. (The project is funded by USAID and individual donors.) They hope ultimately to distribute stoves to nearly all 300,000 refugee families. Brian Tachibana, a volunteer with EWB, ran into resistance when he first visited Khartoum last September to find manufacturers. Presented with a gleaming prototype that had been made in Berkeley, local craftsmen declared firmly, "There's no way you can build this in Sudan." Tachibana needed to tweak the production method—substituting hand shears for high-pressure water jets, for example—to arrive at a workable, low-tech solution.
Gadgil and EWB have yet to settle on a distribution plan. They won't be handing the stoves out as charity—"Giving something away turns the recipients into beggars," Gadgil says—but at $25 apiece, the devices are out of the reach of most families. Gadgil favors some sort of leasing plan, allowing families to rent the stove for about 50 cents a week. The ultimate goal is for the refugees to take over the program, from manufacturing to distribution, which would mean jobs and income. Gadgil's team has already donated a range of scientific equipment, including electronic scales and anemometers to measure wind speed, in order to monitor the existing stoves and test the efficiency of alternatives. "We don't want to claim that this is the final word," Gadgil says. "If somebody comes along tomorrow or next year and says we've got a better stove, all success to them. We're trying to solve a problem here."
© 2007 Newsweek, Inc. |
