Colette's Grand Detour

Day 14 (10th August 2025)

Today is our last day and we are travelling back from Ngorongoro Conservation Area to Arusha. On our way back we will be stopping to see the work of the Clean Stove Project.

G Adventures has projects all over the world that it supports as a way of giving back to the community. The Maasai Clean Stove Project aims to switch out the traditional stoves and open fires that are used within the boma huts to stoves that have a chimney coming our of the room of the bomas. The traditional stove produces a high level of indoor smoke and research showed that women and children in these communities had a very high level of respiratory issues such as tuberculosis. I can attest to just how smokey the huts become with an open fire. On our visit we entered one of the homes that had not yet had the chimney system installed and it was difficult to stay in their for more than a few minutes.

The Project is community-led, with women in the villages trained to be stove engineers and build the stoves for their community. It takes them a few hours to build each stove and then about a week for all the material to set, which is a mixture of bricks and termite cement on the bottom layers, regular cement at the top of the chimney and some metal components around the fire itself. The design of the stove uses local materials which ensures it as low-cost as possible (each stove setup costs around $65 to setup) and uses local materials and design so that the Maasai culture is not being changed, just enhanced.

We visited a boma hut where 4 ladies were constructing a new stove and then another hut where one was now completed and the fire running. The difference in the smoke level was tremendous and you could immediately tell the benefit. It also uses less fire wood, as the system has much more efficient energy usage so that is an added benefit. The project is also now expanding to the provision of solar panels to improve lighting within the boma huts.

To date, more than 4000 stoves have been installed across many villages and over 120 women trained as stove engineers. I loved how this project was community-led. When the project goes to a new village, they hold a meeting with the community, explain the project and its benefits and then the community itself decides which women will be nominated to be trained and oversee the project. And when a stove is installed, 75% of the cost is covered by fundraising and 25% by the individual (if they are able to). This is exactly how the text books describe sustainable development that actually works – grass roots, driven and owned by community-members themselves.

By us visiting the project a donation is made to the project to fund more stoves. A small amount goes to the stove engineers for their work and provides them employment whilst the rest goes to paying for the stove itself. This felt like a very worthy cause. If anyone is interested in making a donation towards a stove, let me know and I can provide details on how to donate directly this particular project, rather than donating to the more general G Adventures Planeterra project which funds many initiatives all over the world.