RESPECT International Blog

by Giselle Trimmer

Close your eyes.

Now imagine you have escaped from the worst forms of violence, you live in the most precarious of conditions and you struggle to feed your family, day by day. Would you not welcome just about anything that would help make your life a bit easier?

For refugees around the globe, this extra help may be found in solar cookers.

How do they work?

It is easy. A solar cooker is a device that changes the light energy of the sun into heat energy to cook food. Although there are several different designs of solar cookers, the following three are the most common types:

Box cookers: These cook at moderate to high temperatures and often accommodate multiple pots. Worldwide, they are the most widespread. There are several hundred thousand in India alone.

Curved concentrator cookers or parabolics: These cook fast at high temperatures, but require frequent adjustment and supervision for safe operation. Several hundred thousand exist, mainly in China. They are especially useful for large-scale institutional cooking.

Panel cookers: Simple, cheap, effective – most panel cookers are just a packet of interconnected reflectors, incorporating elements of box and curved concentrator cookers. They unfold into a small bracket of reflectors around a central space where a cooking vessel sits in a transparent container of a heat resistant plastic.

The simple cooker works well and is one of the most popular solar cookers on the planet. Solar Cookers International’s CooKit is the most widely used.

Solar cooking can bring a number of benefits to refugee communities, including:

* Stimulating environmental sustainability by reducing the demand on forests, thus lessening the environmental impact on host communities.
* Reducing health hazards by diminishing the risk of contracting waterborne diseases, like diarrhea, and respiratory diseases due to the acrid smoke coming from cooking fires, subjecting refugees to levels that can be as much as 100 times above the international safety standards.
* Improving women’s conditions. A 2005 report by Doctors Without Borders found that 82 per cent of rape attacks occur when women are outside the populated villages, usually while searching for firewood. Furthermore, women and girls spend hours collecting firewood and then tending fires. Solar cookers require little attention, hence freeing time to pursue education, increase food production and generate income.

Many of the refugees who have used the solar cookers have spoken glowingly of their benefits, as carried in the Solar Cookers International, Solar Cooker Review. Here are some of their comments:

* “We keep clean, do not have tears in our eyes and have no running noses from smoke.”
* “We do not have to go and look for firewood in faraway places where we do not want to go (for safety reasons).”
* “There is no fire danger for our children or our tents.”
* “We can use the saved firewood collection time to do handiwork (for sale and buying extra food or milk), to be with our children, or to learn from the classes taught in the camp.”

Despite these touching testimonies, when it comes to implementing the new cooking technologies in a refugee situation, a number of drawbacks have been encountered.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in one of its reports identified some of the barriers to a sound implementation of solar cooking, by carrying out an analysis of pilot programmes in Pakistan which used the box cooker, Ethiopia where the CooKit was used, and Kenya, which used both types.