AFP/Shagra, SudanCollecting firewood for cooking puts women in Sudan’s conflict-plagued and impoverished Darfur region at risk of rape. But a simple stove that replaces traditional open fires has cut the time they spend on potentially dangerous missions looking for wood, while also helping the environment and boosting their finances, the UN World Food Programme says. A two-year-old initiative by WFP and its local partners teaches women how to make the stoves. “Our social life has improved a lot as a result of this project,” Nadia Ibrahim, director of a training centre serving the hamlets of Shagra, told visiting European Union ambassadors on Thursday. The initiative promotes community development in a region where villages were razed during the long conflict, and is one way of weaning people off direct food handouts because participants are given food in exchange for training and work, WFP officials said. Humanitarian sources have linked much of the unrest now to pro-government Arab groups, whom they blame for most of the rapes and other violence in camps for the estimated 1.7mn internally displaced people (IDPs) in Darfur. The displacement, along with war-related environmental degradation, has forced women to travel further in search of a dwindling supply of firewood, WFP says. “We’re talking about walking from 10 to 15km. We’re talking about three to four days away from their children,” Cesar Arroyo, head of WFP’s office in the North Darfur state capital El Fasher, told the EU delegation in Shagra. WFP says its project supports about 14,000 people in Shagra. As Arroyo spoke under a broiling sun, a woman sat on the ground demonstrating how the stoves are made. She quickly formed thick rolls of a clay-like mixture and layered them to form the round cooking pot. When hardened, it safely holds the fuel with the food simmering on top. WFP says the stoves are more efficient than open fires, even more so when wood is replaced by briquettes of animal dung and straw which the women are also trained to make. The number of trips needed to get firewood is cut in half, and trees in resource-poor Darfur are saved, WFP says. Ibrahim said the women sell the stoves as well as use them. “It is a source of income for us,” she said in a confident voice, through a translator. “Our revenues are ever-increasing and we use that revenue to expand our activities,” which include child care and nutritional instruction.