Support Families and Economic Development in Honduras
We can’t protect the environment unless we’re generating benefits for people in the process.
Our Justa cookstove program has evolved to include a fully trained network of master stove builders - maestros fogoneros - all over Honduras. These builders are the engines that improve the quality of life for tens of thousands of people per year.
This works because builders earn a good wage, doing meaningful work for their community.
“The income from stove building gives my family enough that we do not have to think about leaving our home.”
This is significant, considering record levels of migration to the US from Central America - people desperately need jobs and want to remain in their homes.
The more stoves we build, the more jobs we can create.
“I believe us women can do all the things that are traditionally viewed as a “man’s job”, with certainty that we are equally valuable.”
Elsa Rodriguez has been a Maestra Fogonera since 2019 and has built over 1000 stoves.
Elsa has worked with her local municipality Intibucá to provide the supplies to build the stoves in her community and she is determined to train other women. “I work training women so they can expand their horizons and meet new people. When we are independent we have more opportunities.”
We are honored to work with so many powerful women, who fight stereotypes and discrimination every day, and lift other women up along the way.
CLEAN COOKING
Each stove reduces smoke and carbon monoxide in the household by 50-75%, protecting the health of women and children, who are most often exposed to open fires.
More recently, connections between smoke exposure, cognitive development, and mental health have been discovered. It should be no surprise to us that the cleaner the air and the more hygienic the environment we spend time in, the better we feel.
Our adoption rates are best-in-class because we designed the Justa stove with a Honduran cook in mind. And of course, as each cook reduces their firewood consumption by half, each stove prevents over 3 metric tons of CO2 (6,500lbs) from being emitted every year and prevents the harvest of 10 full-sized trees during its useful life.
That’s serious, scalable impact.
Help us continue to make an impact! We are currently raising funds to train and employ 15 more maestros fogoneros and to begin going back to households that received stoves in the past to repair and refurbish them.
The Justa Story
Our clean cookstove program started with Doña (Mrs) Justa Nuñez, a mother of six living on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Justa was a community leader concerned with the health of women in her community. She worked with several clean cooking programs before coaching TWP on what Honduran women looked for in a cookstove. After our design evolved to meet her recommendations, it became the most widely adopted firewood cookstove in Central America.
So we named it after her…
