This post was originally produced for Forbes.
Nancy Hughes, a widow who might have been expected to enjoy a quiet retirement with an occasional cruise on a calendar, has instead joined the effort to address one of the world’s single biggest problems: poor people in the developing world are killing themselves and their children cooking over open fires while deforesting the planet in the bargain.
Working with her Rotary club, Nancy has established a nonprofit organization called Stove Team International that built seven factories in five countries to manufacture clean burning wood stoves that require less than half as much wood and produce no visible smoke, 68 percent less particulate matter and 85 percent less carbon emission. Because the stoves are locally produced, they create quality jobs in communities that desperately need them. Almost 45,000 stoves have been produced so far, but that is a drop in the bucket compared with the estimated need of six million stoves in Guatemala alone.
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