Humanitarian Efforts for Improving Air Quality Using Solar Power

Abstract

Indoor air pollution is a major health issue worldwide, responsible for 4.3 million deaths per year, predominantly in developing nations and rural areas. In these areas, families often cook indoors using wood, leaves, manure, and any other locally-available biomass. Cleaner burning cookstoves are occasionally used, but in many rural locations they have experienced a low acceptance rate. The Breeze Project was created to explore alternative means to ameliorate the risk of indoor air pollution through solar-powered ventilation systems. This paper provides the intermediate results of this ongoing project as well as generalized lessons learned over the course of three separate trips to our partner community in Uganda. Our approach is characterized by first understanding the problem first-hand by traveling to a specific community, interfacing with community leaders and residents, and collecting qualitative and quantitative observations. Subsequently, we design a solution that identifies the perceived needs of the community, remotely gather as much prior feedback as possible from community leaders, and conduct a second deployment of a small number of units. This serves as a proof of concept, and qualitative and quantitative observations can inform the researchers of whether the units both create meaningful change and are well-received by the residents. This deployment may also yield unexpected risks and opportunities relevant to subsequent efforts. We follow this trip with a second phase of design revision and prototype fabrication, this time creating enough units to constitute a larger pilot. The third pilot deployment should be focused on gathering feedback on any design modifications, ideally observing any available devices from the second deployment, and beginning to think of how a successful solution could be manufactured locally or regionally. In this paper we will demonstrate some of the specific decisions we made during and prior to these deployments in order to maximize their positive impact and the potential for the project's success in the future.