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Kakuma Refugee Camp is home to about 100,000 refugees, most of them from the neighbouring countries of Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda and Sudan.

This part of Kenya is extremely dry and wood is very, very scarce. The majority of families at Kakuma, like millions of refugees worldwide, are cooking on wood and charcoal fires. The wood cannot be sourced locally and has to be imported from other parts of Kenya, and other countries. The burning of wood contributes significantly to air pollution and to global warming. Every tonne of wood that is burned releases 3.7 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Since half the world cooks with wood, this is a major environmental problem. The project is addressing this directly by helping people convert to cooking with the prime renewable energy source - the power of the sun.

In 1995, the US-based group 'Solar Cookers International' (SCI) started a pilot project in Kakuma that addressed this problem by providing refugees with portable, lightweight solar cookers called 'CooKits'. The project distributed the CooKits and taught people how to use them effectively. The aim was to demonstrate that solar cooking was a practical alternative that would save both money and wood.

SCI has developed a water pasteurisation indicator, called a WAPI, which allows people to use the CooKit for pasteurising water. The WAPI is a small plastic capsule containing soya wax that melts when the water has reached 65oC, the temperature at which all pathogens are killed.

Since the project began in 1995, SCI has purchased and distributed 15,000 CooKits to
families in Kakuma.

In 2001, many families lost their CooKits in very heavy, and unexpected, rains. The Ashden Award money (£7,500) was used to buy 1,000 new CooKits to replace those that were destroyed in the rains.