Central American Micro-Enterprise Stove
Program
Organization
Trees, Water & People (TWP) is an audited 501(c)3 non-profit organization located in Colorado,
USA. Since 1998 TWP has worked across Central
America developing appropriate technology, micro-enterprise,
reforestation, and watershed protection programs that help communities improve
their economic livelihoods and protect their natural resources. In that time we have built 13,000
fuel-efficient, healthy cookstoves and planted
1,000,000 trees in Nicaragua,
Honduras, El
Salvador, Guatemala
and Mexico. TWP's newest
initiative is our Central American Micro-Enterprise Stove Program focused in
the urban centers of
Managua, Nicaragua
and Tegucigalpa, Honduras.
Stove Program
The goal of our Central American Micro-Enterprise Stove
Program is to train entrepreneurs how to profitably build,
market and sell fuel-efficient, healthy cookstoves in
urban centers in both Nicaragua
and Honduras. TWP first began commercializing improved
stoves in Nicaragua
in 2000 after two years of introducing a subsidized, mud-and-brick version of
the stove, or the Justa stove, into rural and peri-urban areas in Honduras. We quickly realized, however, that we could
not meet the demand for the stove through such a dissemination model. When we began to introduce the stove into Nicaragua
we began mass-producing a metal version of the stove in a factory and selling
them.
Our partner organization in Nicaragua,
PROLENA, has had great success commercializing our improved stoves. With help from the Aprovecho Research
Center we trained PROLENA staff how
to properly build, market and sell the EcoStove, a metal version of the Justa
stove. Since then, TWP and PROLENA have
continued to research and design various models of improved stoves to meet the variety of cooking needs in Nicaragua. We now have five different stove models. In total we have sold 6,500 stoves, including
2,200 last year alone. We are on track
to build and sell another 2,000 stoves this year as well.
Based in part on our success in Nicaragua,
last year we teamed up with Aprovecho and TWP's Honduran counterpart, the Honduran Association for
Development, to begin another stove commercialization project in
Tegucigalpa,
Honduras. With funding from the United States Environmental
Protection Agency, Rotary International, The Weyerhaeuser Family Foundation and
the Ashden Award for Sustainable Energy we have
finished training four stove producers and are currently training 26 venders to
help market and sell the stoves. In less
than a month we have already sold 40 stoves in Tegucigalpa
and have orders for another 150. During
this transition period we have continued our successful Justa
stove program to fill immediate demand for stoves. In total we have built more than 3,500 Justa stove in Honduras.
Market
One of the reasons we chose to start this initiative in Nicaragua
and Honduras is
that the urban centers of both countries provided the largest market for
improved stoves. Approximately 50% of
urban families in both these countries still use fuelwood
in traditional, open-fire cookstoves. In Honduras,
this translates into 100,000 households in the capital city, Tegucigalpa,
alone. Many of the early orders we have
received for stoves in Honduras
have come from San Pedro Sula,
Honduras' second largest city, which includes 50,000 families who still use fuelwood. The market is similar in Nicaragua
where over 100,000 families in the seven largest urban centers still use
traditional stoves, including 50,000 in the capital, Managua.
For any further inquiries please contact:
