Lifeline To Haiti: Helping Haitians Help Themselves

A partnership of the WorldStove, LLC (“WS”) and the International Lifeline Fund (“ILF”), the Lifeline to Haiti Project (“LHP”) seeks to help Haiti help itself through the current disaster and beyond by providing fuel-efficient, carbon negative stoves that will alleviate the food and clean water needs of tens of thousands of Haitian families who were rendered homeless by the earthquake. At the same time, LHP will lay the groundwork for a long-term, self-sustaining initiative that will combat deforestation, poverty and diseases attributable to open fire cooking.

The Problem:

Throughout Haiti, 95% of the population relies on wood or wood derivatives (i.e., charcoal) for cooking. This cooking method has ravaged the environment, which has lost literally 98% of its forest cover, and has retarded the living standards of Haitian families, who typically spend 20% of their meager income on charcoal and/or hours of their time each day collecting wood. The indoor air pollution that is caused by open fire cooking is hazardous to health and explains why acute respiratory disease is among the leading causes of death for Haitian children. In the aftermath of the earthquake, the fuel problem has become dire and is exacerbating the humanitarian crisis. Owing to the disruption of supply lines to the capital, there is virtually no charcoal to be found and people have been looting furniture from collapsed buildings. The masses, who cannot afford wood or charcoal, have no means to cook their food or boil water.

The Short-Term Initiative:

To address these urgent needs, LHP will set up a production center in Port au Prince, where we will assemble approximately 2,000 “Lucia” emergency stoves for institutional and household use during our first month of operation. These super-efficient woodless stoves, which are the invention of WS, employ an innovative system of fluid dynamics and are fueled entirely with agricultural waste such as twigs, groundnut shells, rice husk and dung. The Lucia emergency stove will enable a woman to cook for a 5-person household using an average of just 300 grams (about a handful) of fuel per meal. Furthermore, as a result of the pryolytic cooking process it employs, the Lucia stove creates biochar – a substance that functions as a highly effective fertilizer and that can be sold on the market, thereby turning the stove into an income generator for each of its users. All of the equipment and materials LHP needs to get off the ground are ready to ship or in the process of being shipped to Haiti (including the manufactured steel components of the stove, a plasma cutting table, sheet metal and 64 tons of pelletized fuel generously donated by Green Circle Bioenergy, Inc.). Our team is on the ground and should be ready to begin distribution some time in February. Our initial priority will be the placement of 400 institutional stoves in hospitals, schools, orphanages and the spontaneous camps that have emerged outside of Port au Prince. As a pair of these stoves can accommodate about 200 individuals, we should be able to reach about 40,000 beneficiaries. Following distribution to these priority targets, LHP will expand its efforts to include the provision of stoves to individual families, concentrating on those residing in the most hard-hit locations. The 1,600 household stoves will serve approximately 8,000 beneficiaries. Hence, the total number of beneficiaries reached during Phase I should be approximately 48,000. In coordination with other NGOs, ILF will take the lead in organizing the delivery of stoves, training users to operate them, and monitoring the results. ILF will work closely with other NGOs on the ground in an effort to form reliable and efficient distribution chains.

 

The Medium-Term Program:

The second Phase of the LHP will consist of the local production of household/institutional emergency Lucia stoves and their distribution to institutions and households over a five month periods. We conservatively estimate that we will have the capacity to produce about 2,600 household stoves and 400 institutional stoves per month (depending on need) at a cost of $7 to $9 per stove for the household version and about $25 for the institutional one. Assuming these targets are met, LHP will reach more than 300,000 beneficiaries by the end of Phase Two. We anticipate that throughout this period, we will train and employ about 12 stove builders and 50 distributor/trainers, resulting in the creation of about 62 full time jobs.

 

The Long-Term Solution:

By the time the situation in Haiti begins to stabilize, ILF and WS will have laid all of the groundwork and training necessary for local Haitian partners to assume primary responsibility for the project and to become “stove hubs” – that is, self-sustaining enterprises that will have the capacity to manufacture, distribute and sell the “commercial” Lucia stove for both household and institutional use in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In addition to creating about 62 jobs in the manufacture/distribution of the stoves themselves, we will be setting up a pellet production plant, which should be completed by the beginning of Phase III and which should produce approximately 25 to 30 more jobs. With the help of WS, it is anticipated that the project will ultimately become “carbon eligible.” The carbon credits thus obtained will enable the stove literally to pay for itself, such that it can be made affordable even to the poorest of Haiti’s poor. In the end, LHP promises to create benefits for the Haitian population that exceed the investment in the project by orders of magnitude. By eliminating the need for wood as a fuel source and creating biochar, production and dissemination of the Lucia stove offers the potential to help prevent and, indeed, reverse the deforestation that has destroyed the Haitian countryside. For the individuals who are its end users, the Lucia stove will dramatically improve both their health and their livelihoods. And, finally, the manufacturing and distribution process will build local capacity – creating jobs and wealth for Haitians at the same time that they contribute to the rebuilding of their country, the restoration of their environment and the growth of their economy.