Creating economic opportunity through climate resilience
Project
Deforestation
INDONESIA
Client: UNDP/FAO
Challenge
High rates of deforestation in Myanmar. Deforestation causes many big environmental problems, including loss of tree cover that absorbs carbon dioxide, which contributes to climate warming, and loss of tree cover for certain crops can impact crop productivity; the lack of trees to hold the soil can cause soil erosion, which increases the impact of flooding, and so on.
Innovation
In addition to big environmental impacts, HDI, using its human-centered design approach, gained insights from the people and communities impacted by deforestation. HDI designed formative research to understand why the forests are being cleared and for what purpose. Wood from trees is primarily used as fuel for cooking. Families, particularly young children and women went deeper into the forest to collect wood. This resulted in an increased risk for malaria because of the density of mosquitoes in the forest and put women and girls at a safety risk as well as missing school.
HDI converged from a big-picture understanding of the problem to understanding insights at an individual and community level.
Our design solution was fuel-efficient wood stoves so that women and girls would not have to go in and collect so much wood so often. HDI developed this in collaboration with a women's collaborative of potters who made the stoves.
Results
The win-win solution created a business opportunity for women to produce and sell fuel-efficient stoves while prolonging the efficiency of stoves by reducing how much fuel wood needed to be collected and how often. This initiative was sustained through a $100k sponsorship by Texaco, possibly one of the earliest private-sector partnership initiatives in the development sector.