Solar Solution

Solar cooking is a simple concept that has been around over a century.

Solar cookers work by trapping or concentrating the sun’s rays and converting most of them to heat.  This process produces endless free cooking energy with no negative heath or environmental effects.    

The challenge in solar cooking is not in finding enough heat for cooking; it is finding the heat when the cooking needs to be done.

Until a few years ago, it was widely assumed that solar cooking was so brilliant an idea, it only needed only to be introduced to the developing world and it would spread like wildfire.

Dozens of solar cooking projects were launched throughout the developing world.  Thousands of ovens were distributed to test families and detailed results of oven performance were kept. 

Unfortunately, with very few exceptions, the solar oven use never spread beyond the original test families.  Worse, many of the ovens were abandoned shortly after the project workers left.      

Why?

As well intentioned and clever as the solar cooking projects were, they failed to realize an important concept…

They were producing a commercial product.

Imagine this scenario. You want to release a revolutionary new product in a market you are unfamiliar with.  How do you begin? Would you limit yourself to designs that can be built by a novice, using materials purchased at a home improvement store; if your potential market was 1.8 billion people? Would you wait to ask potential customers if the design was appropriate for their lives until after you had spent your time and money to manufacture and distribute this product? Would you release a product that works only 30% of the time and costs the equivalent of 2 weeks salary? Would you assume that your target audience is not status conscious? Of course you wouldn't.  Neither would we.

Teenagers in Ain Bni Mathar show off the family cell phone