November 29, 2007 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Photograph by Tom Cogill
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a woman to build a solar oven, and you not only help feed her for a lifetime, but enable her to escape domestic abuse and other difficulties that can hold women back.
That’s the discovery of the Central American Solar Energy Project. The private foundation, in Charlottesville, Va., sponsors workshops in villages in Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua to teach women to build and cook with ovens heated by the sun.
Bill Lankford, a physics professor who retired from George Mason University in 2003, founded the project in 1991 after seeing a solar oven in Costa Rica. Each 30-by-32-inch oven consists only of wood, glass, and aluminum sheets, all cheap supplies. A window lets in sunlight, and a black metal cooking plate traps enough energy that the ovens can reach 375 degrees.
Mr. Lankford started the project partly for the environment: Solar ovens cut down the need to slash forests for firewood. He also initially geared workshops toward men, who gave ovens to their wives as gifts.
That didn’t go over well, he says. The women felt imposed upon and refused to use the ovens. He soon realized “the really important thing is that women build the ovens themselves, because it creates motivation for them to use it.”
Women turned out to be better, more-patient carpenters anyway, says Mr. Lankford. Plus, the project used the workshops to educate women on nutrition, raising children, and domestic abuse, and also helped them apply for grants to improve their villages. “It’s more than just a solar-energy project,” Mr. Lankford says.
So far, the group has helped build 1,000 ovens. Groups in Central America raise some money for the project, but the U.S. headquarters has a budget of $173,000, much of that generated from a modest endowment, which started with bequests from Mr. Lankford’s family.
Here, Guatemalan women nail aluminum sheets to a wooden oven frame.
