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Solar Cookers for Axi Village
Project Manager: Drolmatso (Delores)
buy 60 solar cookers for the people of Axi Village. this will improve villagers' living conditions, reduce the heavy burden on women, and increase girls' school attendance.
Funds needed: $1,156 (9,100 rmb)
The Shambala Connection funded this project
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Drolma tso is from Axi village, Ruorgai County, Aba Tibetan Autonomous prefecture, Sichuan Province, PRC. She is currently working towards an associated degree in English at the Qinghai Normal University Nationalities Department's English Training Program.
Project Location:
Axi village is located in Ruorgai County, Aba Tibetan Autonomous prefecture, Sichuan Province, PR, China. It is 596 kilometers from Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan Province.
Population:
There are approximately 1,030 people in Axi village. The oldest woman is 85 years old. The oldest man is 79 years old. There are 370 women, 350 men and 310 children in Axi village.
Education:
Most of the villagers are poorly educated. About 90% of them are illiterate. There are 200 school-aged students. There are 15 students in primary school. There are 6 students in middle school, and there are no students in high school. I am the only female college student, and I'm the solar cooker project manager for Axi village.
Cash income:
The average cash income of this village is 1500-1800 RMB a year. Yearly each family needs to spend 950 RMB to buy grain, rice, wheat and oil. On average, each family needs to spend about 500-600 RMB a year to buy clothes and medicine for the members of the family. On average, there are 8-9 members in each family. Each family has 50-60yaks, 15 sheep and 3-4 horses. They need to pay 150 RMB in taxes to the government each year for those animals. For primary school they need to pay about 150 RMB per student each semester. As the students get older they need to pay high school tuition as well. Therefore, each Axi village family spends more than 1800 RMB a year. Often villagers do not have enough money to cover all of their expenses by the end of the year.
Agriculture:
Because of the cold weather, there is no agriculture in the village. All the villagers are nomads. The average elevation in Axi village is above 3,500meters. Herding:
In this village the average family has 50-60 yaks, 3-4 horses, and 15 sheep. People earn money from selling livestock and the dairy products that yaks produce. Per family they can earn between 1500-1800 RMB per year.
Weather:
The weather in Ruorgai County is usually cold. Winter is very cold and long. Many of the livestock die because of lack of fodder, which is covered by heavy snows. In July and August the weather is hot, so it is hard for both people and animals to get enough water.
Project Goals:
The overall goal of the project is to improve villagers' living conditions, reduce the heavy burden on women, and increase girls' school attendance. The immediate goal of this project is to buy 60 solar cookers
Problems:
• Women's Burden
It is mainly women and girls who make fuel in Axi village. It is a time-consuming and physically demanding process. They spend about three hours a day making fuel. Women need to get up around 5 in the morning and make fuel. Especially in the winter they need to haul yak-dung for about 1 kilometer to the top of a mountain where sunshine is strongest, in order to dry the dung out. Women also travel long distances to collect fuel. In the summer, aside from making fuel, women also need to milk yaks, herd livestock, cook, fetch water, and take care of children. In the winter women mainly need to spin yak hair and wool for making black tents and ropes.
• Low scores on exams
Students are the main helpers for collecting fuel and cooking food in each family. Often students help to collect fuel after school, so they do not have time to do homework and prepare for the next class. This makes it very difficult to hand their homework in on time and creates problems with class. In the spring, summer and autumn some of the students are taken away to gather dung in the pasture with their parents. These students only attend school in the wintertime. As a result their scores get lower and lower.
• Health problems
Using yak and sheep dung to cook has very bad effects on people's throats and lungs. As time passes people realize that burning dung has bad effects on their bodies. This especially affects women, who spend a lot of time cooking over the stove.
Solutions
1) Reduce women's burden.
If we have solar cookers, it will save about 49 hours each week. Firstly, women will not need to get up early. They usually spend more than 5 hours to carry fuel to the top of the mountain every morning. Secondly, if we have solar cookers, women will no longer have to spend 2 hours each day spreading fuel in the sun and carrying fuel into the house.
2) Increase school attendance and improve exam scores
Another important impact is that children will have a chance to go school; the girls will especially have an increased chance to attend school. Often in this village parents take their children out of school in the summer and autumn in order to make fuel. The families who have solar cookers will only have to collect half as much fuel during winter and almost none in summer. This will reduce the need to remove children from school. Students' can use the time they save with the solar cookers to do homework and review for the class, and scores may improve.
3) Improved health
This project will help to reduce the prevalence of lung related diseases, which are caused by burning dung for fuel. It will reduce the indoor pollution that is harmful primarily to women's health, because if we have solar cookers then it may help reduce the time women spend cooking inside the house. Instead, they can spend some time cooking outside with clean solar energy.
Gender Equality:
In my hometown collecting fuel is the duty of women and girls only, regardless of the physical difficulties or time required. Therefore, women and girls have much less free time than men and boys. This reduces their opportunity to attend school. This project will also benefit women the most because cooking is mostly assigned to them, and so solar cookers will directly improve their lives.
The manager of this solar cooker project is a woman and the women of the village will be implementing it. By doing all these things, the project manager also sends an important message to the local women and girls that they can also do something very useful and important.
Project Activities:
- Held a meeting to discuss the needs of Axi village and gathered related information (completed).
- wrote project proposal (completed).
- Held a meeting with local people and chose the 60 poorest families in the village based on how many livestock they have and how many people were in their family. We also considered how much debt each family had and how many students they supported, h ow much money they borrow from the bank each year, and how many people are able to work in each family. Every single villager agreed that the chosen families were very poor and that they have a right to get the solar cookers (completed).
- Apply for funding.
- Funds are received.
- Collect local contribution from the families who will get the solar cookers.
- Hold a meeting with the villagers to discuss project implementation
- We will buy the Solar Cookers from the Liuji Solar Cooker Factory, which is in Xining. Over the past four years, many students from Qinghai Normal University who did solar cooker projects bought their equipment from this factory. After completing these projects, the students found that the quality and price of Liuji Solar Cookers is good, so I asked these project managers whether the quality is still good, and they said that it is. The factory will send some skilled workers to Axi Village to show the villagers how to use the solar cookers correctly, and the project manager will help with this process.
9. Interview local people.
10. Take photos.
11.Write final report and submit it.
Detailed Budget:
Item
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Price per item rmb
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Number of items
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Donor Contribution rmb
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Local Contribution
rmb
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Total cost rmb
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Solar cookers (Includes transportation fee) |
200 |
60 |
9,000
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3000 |
12,000 |
Management fee
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500 |
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Management expenses: phone calls, photos and copies
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100 RMB
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Total cost |
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9,100
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3,500 |
12,600 |
Total donor contribution in RMB= 9,100 in dollars=$ 1 , 156
Sustainability:
This project is sustainable because families will pay for any repairs or maintenance costs. Previous experience indicates that the lifetime of a solar cooker is 10 years at minimum. Moreover, villagers will be shown how to use and care for their solar cookers.
Map of Project Location:
Photos:
Her name is Drolma, and she is six years old. She has no chance to go to school because she needs to help her mother collect yak dung. Here she is collecting and drying yak dung.
This is Tashi Lhamo. She is twenty-eight years old. She has five children and has made yak dung her whole life. She is making yak dung here.
Garang cuomo is 26 years old and she is making yak dung here.
This is Garang cuomo. Here she is gathering yak dung and taking it far away to dry. She spends the entire morning during the summer doing the same thing. She needs to do this while she is milking.
Her name is Drolma. She is six years old. She has just finished laying out the day's dung.
Qingtso is another villager. She is fifty years old. She has eight children. She has made yak dung her whole life. Here she is spreading the dung in the sun for drying.
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