Traditional cooking is a major problem, especially for women.
The biggest challenge is about the health because they are breathing the smoke,
which is unhealthy and lead them to have like sore throats, sore eye, coughing
or lung and heart disease.
My name is Sum Sophea, and my passion is to support the communities
to improve the people's health and economies.
Actually, I was born in a poor family.
Most of the time, the cooking is handled by the woman's.
first of all, they have to chop up the tree and making the fires
and that take a long time to to start it up and also to cook the food.
My mother is just like any other woman.
She's also bearing with the smokes.
Around four and a half billion people around the world
lack access to clean, modern cooking.
Cooking with wood has a huge impact on carbon emissions.
It creates more emissions than the global airline industry.
At the same time, it's
also the leading cause of deforestation in many of the countries we work in.
Back in 2015, the
two founding NGO's Engineers Without Borders and Live and Learn
won the Google Impact Challenge to take what was a prototype biodigester
at that time and then turn it into a social enterprise
where we could actually sell it as a life changing product.
So at that time, I was lucky enough to to be involved in
that was able to pack up the family and head over to Cambodia to kick it off.
I remember one day, about a year later, we had about ten staff,
and I walked into the office and there was all these people
in green shirts doing things,
and I was like, Oh, wow, like, this is actually real.
So a big part of what we first did was actually just going out
and spending time in villages, spending time with people
to understand what their needs were, how they could interact with the products.
People definitely saw cooking with wood as a problem
at multiple levels, both for themselves personally, also their local environment.
And they could say it wasn't sustainable
and they were willing to do something about
it was just having the right solution for their contexts.
So a biodigester is like a large stomach.
Basically, it breaks down all the materials,
be it cow cow manure, animal manure, green waste, et cetera.
And then the bacteria in there
break it down into biogas, which can be used for cooking just like LPG
and then an organic fertilizer that can increase crop
yield between five to 30%, depending on what you're putting it on.
Actually, biologist, there is not a new technology,
but ATEC design is a plug and play system
which you can install in three to four hour, which very quick.
And it's also can bear in the challenging environment,
including flooded area, which is very common in rural Cambodia.
So COVID has had one really
big negative effect and one very big positive effect on the work that we do.
For example, previously we do the sale like old school selling door to door
selling because the COVID, we cannot go out and meet people.
However, we switch to the e-commerce sales.
So if you take Cambodia, there are now more smartphones
than people in the country, and e-commerce has gone from something
that was a very sort of niche urban option towards it being available to everyone
and everyone across the country starting to use it.
There's been a lot of changes in where people are living.
So I think there's a lot of people living in urban areas, bringing back
some of the habits into the rural areas, which is great.
People now in Cambodia, they're concerned more about the health
they used to live in the urban area where they're cooking with
like good or clean or modern cooking situation
so when they move back with the biodigester they still have that.
Lately, I was so happy
and was very proud with ATEC that they introduced as a product
called E-Cook Induction Stove, which I can give it out to my mother.
So now she have a cleaner
cooking solution, which is more healthy for her and I'm very happy with that.
Once you understand the impact that solving clean cooking
will have on the people and planet, it's hard to focus on doing anything else.