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Today is the international womens day, so lets take this opportunity to look into SDG #5 – Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.

At Solar Bora we are focusing on one part of this goal: Enhance the use of enabling technology, in particular information and communications technology, to promote the empowerment of women.

Based on data between 2000 and 2016 from about 90 countries, women spend roughly three times as many hours in unpaid domestic and care work as men (https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdg5). A big part of this time is spent cooking food for the family. In Sub-saharan Africa there are 600 million people cooking their food over open fire, with wood and charcoal. Globally around 3 billion people still cook using solid fuel, such as wood and charcoal.

This type of cooking leads to something called Household air pollution, which globally leads to 3.8 million deaths every year, according to the WHO. Most exposed to this are women and younger childern, since they spend most time near the fire.

So what has Solar Bora to do with this?

Well, this problem is one of the main reasons for the companys existance! At Solar Bora, we want to enable people to change the way they cook, to a safer, healthier and faster way.

This is done by providing clean and affordable energy, enabling the customers to cook safely with induction cooking. Above being good for the health, induction cooking is very fast. This means that you can do something else with your time! What do you want to do?

Our product is constantly being developed, we always want to become better.

One project going on right now is performed by our two master students Oskar and Morgan. They are studying mechanical engineering, with a focus on product development and construction technique. At the moment, they are working with us at Solar Bora to develop a better way to mount our batteries. The batteries are a key component in our system, and it is crucial that they work as expected. This project will both improve the performance of the system, the mounting process and the durability of the system by securing the support system for the batteries. On top of that, it will reduce our environmental impact dring transport, since we will be able to transport the batteries mounted in the cabinet, and therefore avoiding additional packaging and transport just for the batteries. When we then get to the customer, the whole system will already be ready for connection!

We are looking forward to implement this solutions in our upcoming deliveries!

As stated in yesterdays post, there are health problems associated with the traditional cooking of food, when charcoal and fire wood is used. On top of that, it takes long time. For the small group of women that got to try our system during our first trial, every meal took approximately two hours to cook the traditional way. With SolarBora it only took half the time, or even less!

 

An important part of our work is to really understand the pros and cons with the systems in place today VS our system, to know what our company actually can do to improve the live of our customers. Something we have heard and seen many times, and now also documented, is the problem with the smoke from the fire when cooking.

When the weather allows it, all the meals are cooked outdoors to minimize the smoke problems. During rainy seasons though, many women are forced to cook indoors to at all get the fire going. This means that the smoke is trapped inside the room, in short term leading to breathing difficulties and running eyes and noses. Long-term, this is causing premature death. According to WHO, 4.3 million people a year die prematurely from illness attributable to the household air pollution caused by the inefficient use of solid fuels for cooking.

Tomorrow, we will show you the documented result from when the same family got to cook their food the Solar Bora way!

One of the Sustainable development goals that might be a bit difficult to know how to handle is number 13 – climate action. This is a goal concerning basically everything we do, since most of our actions and choices in some way will affect the planet. Greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are driving the climate change, and is it affecting every country on every continent.

It has been said that “no one can do everything but everyone can do something”, and we want to do as much as we can.

Solar power is a clean source of energy. If you compare using a solar powered induction cooker to the traditional way of cooking with fire wood or charcoal, the advantages are many. There won’t be any greenhouse gas emissions neither in the production of the electricity nor at the usage phase. Good, huh?