Fred Colgan & Assitan Sylla Traore, "Creating Lasting Solutions through innovative Cookstove Tech"

One out of every three people on earth cooks over open fires--at a cost that is both staggering and unsustainable. Such cooking practices produce more pollution than all automobiles on the planet, cause 4.3 million deaths each year from smoke-related illnesses, lead to over-harvesting that causes deforestation rates of up to 11% per year, and put and women and children at risk of life-altering burns and blindness while cooking, and rape, abduction and murder while out gathering fuel.

The team at InStove thinks it doesn't have to be this way. Their nonprofit mission is to improve health, enhance safety and reduce harm to the environment through the design, manufacture and delivery of highly efficient stoves and allied technologies for vulnerable populations worldwide. In addition to their highly-efficient biomass stoves, InStove produces innovative technologies for water pasteurization, medical equipment sterilization, and alternative fuel production, all of which work off-the-grid and are ideal for use in disaster relief settings and rural locations in the developing world.
Join Fred Colgan and Assitan Sylla Traore for their Tech Talk at Google. Fred is Executive Director and founder of InStove, and has spent the last decade becoming a world expert on clean cookstoves. He has introduced them to vulnerable communities that include refugee camps in Darfur, Ethiopia, and Kenya. Assitan, InStove's Africa Projects Coordinator, is a former Fulbright scholar from Mali who grew up cooking over open fires, and now holds masters' degrees in Languages and International Studies with a focus on Gender and Environment. Their talk will explore different aspects of the problem, and the way InStove, through technology, is helping to solve them.