report on solar cooking activities in mali and burkina faso
adapted from a letter to barbara kerr from wietske jongbloed -- april, 2002
thank you so much for your extensive explication about your experiences with a larger cookit. i very much appreciate the time you took to do it. i have forwarded it to dr. derk rijks who has been starting explaining the use of the cookit in a village in northern senegal where he used to work in the early seventies and has been in contact with his assistant there ever since.
he will now try to make a prototype following your explications. he plans to visit the village again by the end of this month and try it out. the village will be producing cookits themselves with carton and aluminum foil bought in the capital dakar.
i
also forwarded it to the afima in mali. afima stands for "association de femmes ing�nieurs de mali", technical university educated women. they invited me in
may 2001 to teach them the use of the cookit, forty of their members attended the
workshop. with two of them i also visited one village near bamako (the capital) and
2 villages 300 miles to the north of the country to popularize the use of the
cookit. here also everybody was amazed about the possibility of using sunshine
for cooking, but the women, although buying every cookit we took with us, asked
if we could not make a bigger one for their large cooking pots.
what is very
interesting
is that the afima wrote a project to introduce the cookit in eight sites all over
the country territory (which is the second largest of africa, but more than half
is part of the sahara desert), so from timbuktu in the north, to gao in the
east, kayes in
the
west and s�gou and mopti in the center, sikasso in the south, etc. in each site
they will introduce the production of the cookit and its use to local
women groups. they think of 200 cookits per site, so will start with 1800
cookits in total, may be some of a larger size if that appears to be practical
(wind, larger pieces of carton, etc.). they have asked financing from several
organisations, amongst them usaid which has an office in bamako. what is so nice
about this is that they organize all these activities by themselves. the cookit
with all its restrictions is the only solar cooker that people in the rural
areas and those in suburban areas (shanty towns) can afford.
in
burkina faso it is among others the fescifa (femmes scientifiques de faso) who takes up
the lead. they were represented at the seminar, and already popularizing the haybasket, they are now taking up the cookit in their program. also at the
seminar was the president of a women's group which has sister groups in all the
45 provinces of burkina faso. next may they will have a congress with
representatives of all these groups where they want to introduce the 100
participants to the cookit. another participant of the seminar, she is a
specialist in burkina faso in propagating the use of haybaskets, said she was
going to order ten cookits for the maternity clinic in the village where she was
born. so there will always be warm water to wash the babies and the mothers,
while during the night the water can be kept hot in haybaskets. so you see that
news about the cookit is spreading around from different sources. and the nice
thing is that it is done by local initiative. ok, this is some of the latest
news. i will keep you informed about the progress of the production and use of
the large cookit. best greetings and once more thanks a lot for all the info,
contact info:
mrs. saly gakou, the president of afima:
femsa-mali@datatech.toolnet.org
mrs. elisabeth ouedraogo, the president of fescifa is:
emarieange@hotmail.com
isomet in burkina faso:
isometbf@liptinfor.bf.
wietske jongbloed: wiewen@bart.nl