Elburn-made solar ovens give hope to many in Third World

By Emily Krone Daily Herald Business Writer

In a tiny fishing village in Ghana, women devote the better part of each morning to gathering firewood.

Every day, steady streams of these women, with babies on their backs and bundles of branches on their heads, make the same trek, down the same road, to mine the same dwindling supply of timber.

Closer to home, in a tiny industrial park nestled between Elburn and Geneva, two employees of Sun Ovens International construct solar ovens destined for villages in Ghana and other places where subsistence is the primary occupation.

Meanwhile, the company's president, Paul Munsen, bakes chocolate chip cookies in an eight-foot tall contraption that looks like a cross between a satellite dish and an Easy-Bake Oven. The technology he is demonstrating could revolutionize the lives of timber-toting women everywhere.

In more than 126 countries, from Ghana to Haiti to Afghanistan, Munsen's Sun Ovens already have.

Worldwide, 2 billion households depend on wood and charcoal to prepare food. Population growth has gradually depleted the availability of firewood, resulting in swaths of deforested areas. Nearly one in three people (1.7 billion) live in countries considered to have critically low levels of forest cover, according to a study by Population Action International.

Some aid organizations will not send supplies made out of wood to parts of Africa - sending, for example, metal crutches instead of wood ones - for fear that anything flammable will be used for fuel. Women in these areas must travel ever widening distances to collect wood, often at great personal cost.

"It's hard for us to imagine because we take so much for granted, having electricity and gas and all types of fuel available," said Pat Merryweather of Rotary International. "Firewood in many communities is such a precious resource that oftentimes women are attacked for it. Sometimes women search all day for it."

Additionally, the health effects of cooking over an open fire can be dire. According to the World Health Organization, children whose mothers cook over open fires are more at risk of contracting acute respiratory infections, which cause between 4 million and 5 million deaths annually among small children.

Sun ovens, which come in family-sized and village-sized models, reduce dependency on wood by utilizing the most basic renewable resource: sunshine.

Throughout Africa the annual wood consumption for cooking is 1,000 pounds of wood per person. A family of six using a sun oven for 70 percent of their cooking needs would save 1.9 tons of wood per year, according to Munsen.

The ovens can roast, steam, boil and bake food at temperatures of 360 degrees. Because Sun Ovens allow very little air movement, food cooked in them remains exceptionally moist, according to Mike Little, who has sold about 250 of the ovens at his Las Vegas trailer-supply shop. He also said the design prevents food from burning by heating it uniformly. The family-sized ovens retail for $229.

Like many companies trading in green technology, Sun Ovens sells a product that people in America should want, but don't, particularly. American demand for the product peaked in 2000, when Y2K placed a premium on technology that required only that the sun would come up tomorrow.

Demand spiked again earlier this year as fuel prices soared. Nevertheless, the domestic market, which accounts for about 15 percent of Sun Oven sales, doesn't extend much beyond the log-cabin, Armageddon niche.

"From a marketing background, I've never seen a product so challenging," said Munsen, who began his career as a marketing consultant. "The people who need it can't afford it. And the people who can afford it don't perceive a need."

Munsen has settled on a business model that straddles the line between charity and enterprise. He describes Sun Ovens as a for-profit company that has yet to turn a profit.

Most Sun Ovens go to Third World countries, where Munsen partners with local entrepreneurs and non-government organizations to distribute the ovens at affordable prices. Rotary International, CARE and Interfaith Ministries are among the organizations that have lent financial and logistical support.

In June, Sun Ovens received an innovation award from the World Bank to establish a solar-powered bakery in South Africa. HIV-positive women will serve nutritionally fortified bread cooked in giant Sun Ovens.

A portion of the proceeds, along with a percentage of the money saved in fuel costs, will go to start additional bakeries in other towns. Sun Ovens developed the project with the queen of the eastern cape community that will receive the first bakery.

In every international project, Munsen tries to work with local, grass-roots organizations headed by women. Only local women versed in local customs, he said, can convince someone cooking the same way her mother's mother cooked to adopt a radically new approach.

"Cooking is a very personal thing," Munsen said. "Change comes very slowly."

For example, Munsen said, a woman in Zambia will say she cannot make corn maize, the staple of the Zambian diet, in a solar oven. To achieve the proper consistency, Zambian women stand over the open fire and gradually add water to the mixture.

A solar oven would require the woman to know in advance how much water to use, which would require a recipe, which would require her to know how to read.

When Munsen bought the company in 1997, he knew little about deforestation and even less about the cooking habits of Zambian women. He originally served as the company's marketing consultant. After the founder decided to retire, he formed a group of investors to buy the company and move it from Milwaukee to Elburn.

Munsen said the biggest challenges have been cultural. He struggles to collect money from people who have never had it; to operate efficiently in areas where timeliness is not a virtue; to persevere when local customs contradict basic principles of American capitalism.

To wit, Munsen devoted four years to a project in Sri Lanka that fell through when the Sri Lankan banker discovered Munsen was from Chicago. The financer knew Chicago as the city of Al Capone and assumed a company operating from there would have ties to organized crime. To date, he has not been able to find a Sri Lankan bank willing to loan money to someone connected to Chicago.

Munsen, who lives in south suburban Justice, estimates he has between 75 and 100 projects pending at any given time, about four of which will materialize. In 2003, the company had sales of about $230,000, and Munsen hasn't collected a pay check in half a year. "I can't tell you how broke we are," he said.

Still, the company has survived on a shoestring since 1986, and Munsen is finding innovative ways to stay afloat. He recently opened an assembly operation in Haiti, where Haitians can tool the large solar ovens for $6,000, about half the price of making the product stateside.

Sun Ovens has a history of overcoming obstacles. About a year and a half ago, Rotarians from Shanghai financed a Sun Oven for an orphanage in North Korea.

At about the same time that North Korea was announcing its nuclear aspirations, Sun Ovens International managed to bring a little sunshine to the most shrouded dictatorship on Earth.