The Berkeley Darfur Stove is a high-efficiency outdoor cooking stove with improved heat transfer characteristics, high combustion under draft, improved mechanical stability, and a design that uses very few parts and can easily be built with hand tools and the simple equipment that is typically available in remote areas of the world.
The stove provides women in refugee camps an increased measure of safety. Because of the efficiency of the stove –it is four times more efficient than traditional 3-stone fires and two times more efficient than clay stoves, these women need to leave the camps much less often to forage for fire wood, a scarce resource in the area, thus reducing risk of attack when outside of the refugee camp In addition, since the stove uses significantly less fire wood than a traditional three-stone fire, the Berkeley-Darfur Stove gives the heavily denuded environment a chance to recover.
This stove fully encloses the open flames, and thus substantially reduces the danger of the dense straw-and-stick shelters burning down because of open fire cooking. The stove produces much less smoke than those currently in use and thus reduces smoke inhalation in cramped shelters during indoor cooking.
