Impact of Our Methods

Our Vision is a future with:

GOOD EDUCATION: Higher enrollment in schools for children as a result of less time spent cutting and collecting firewood.

CLEAN ENVIRONMENT: Reduced deforestation & cleaner water in these rain-forest regions.

GROWING BUSINESS: More individuals involved in business enterprises after they become trained stove builders.

HEALTHIER HOUSEHOLDS: Households with reduced incidences of respiratory ailments & fewer children suffering burn injuries from open cooking flames.

HEALTHIER COMMUNITIES: Communities who are more self-reliant for future sustainability projects.

Our Water for Humans staff, The Hunger Project-Mexico social work experts, and Aprovecho (a cookstove certification center), have developed extensive qualitative and quantitative impact evaluation processes to ensure we meet these goals.

Impact Evaluation

• Quantitative: THP staff visit households and ask families to provide information for a multi-faceted survey, measuring: For our energy-efficient La Mazateca cookstoves we measure: cooking time, cooking ease, firewood gathering time, amount of firewood used, impressionistic improvement of respiratory ailments, estimated smoke reduction.
• Qualitative: THP staff also conduct lengthy interviews with families using open-ended questions, allowing families to discuss their experience with our technology.

This evaluation process allows us to measure how many people install our technology vs. how many people continue to use it.

It helps us enact mid-course corrections on user information sessions to accommodate common user complaints.

• For our Gen1 La Mazateca cookstove, survey data allowed for design corrections in stove height, chimney redirection (because of palm roofs), efficiency in heating methods and heating time, and it has motivated us to incorporate materials easier to transmit between villages.
• According to post-installation surveys, our stoves have a 91% user satisfaction rating.