Solar Cooking Project Offers New Chances for Improving Resilience in Rural Yemen

The Yemen war has led to a substantial increase in poverty rates. Fuel shortages and price ‎increases have also affected cooking: millions of households are thrown back into firewood-based ‎cooking, which is an inefficient practice with substantial health risks. ‎

Together with the Yemeni NGO Youth of Peace, EADP implemented the project “Solar cookers in ‎rural Yemen: Enabling income generation through training” (SoCIRY), which taught ‎underprivileged women from rural areas in Sana’a governorate how to build and market solar ‎cookers. These devices are low-tech cooking solutions, which require no fuel and can heat water ‎and food based on solar radiation. The solar cookers’ design used in the project was prepared by ‎students of the EADP class “Energy and Development Project” between 2016 and 2018. The ‎project started in March and concluded in November 2020 with a public event. Participants and ‎project staff presented and discussed the results with local and national politicians and civil society ‎representatives. ‎

The project received financial support from the Stiftung Nord-Süd-Brücken on behalf of the ‎German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.‎