FIREfly Health

Donate to bring safer stoves to people across the globe!

FIREfly Health is a project founded by three middle and high school students at Mt. Everest Academy in San Diego, CA. We have created a safe, affordable, and efficient stove to help mitigate the issue of poor household air quality around the world. Founded in 2023, FIREfly Health has since had great success. We won first place at the 2023 Jacobs Teen Innovation Challenge and were given $1000 to donate to Doctors Without Borders in FIREfly Health’s name. Please further this generosity to help us reach more people in need! We created a video detailing our project. Donating will help us collaborate with the United Nations and get our project off the ground! Thank you for taking the time to read our story.

The FIRE part of FIREfly Health stands for:

Our stoves address all of these points. FIREfly Health stoves are an effective replacement for anyone who uses open fires, which produce large quantities of smoke inside homes. Breathing in smoke has numerous adverse effects on health and can lead to many serious diseases. About 2.4 billion people, or nearly one-third of the global population, are exposed to toxic fumes when cooking and heating with open, inefficient fires.

Our mission is to help as many people who use open and inefficient fires as possible by providing them with a safe alternative. We plan to provide the resources so individuals can build the FIREfly Health stove themselves. It is vital that an efficient replacement is used to cook food and warm a house instead of an open fire. The FIREfly Health stove provides a cost-effective and safe solution. It is created with reused materials, making the FIREfly Health stove sustainable. Specifically, cans from food packages or other sources can be reused to create the stove. Once assembled, the stove can be used to cook food and boil water, killing contaminants and making it safe to consume. The stove model is adaptable to accommodate cans of different sizes and shapes. Additional cans may be used to lengthen the chimney. A longer chimney creates a stronger draft to suction fumes up the chimney, which helps the fire burn more efficiently. A larger can for the fire would create an oven structure along with the stove, providing more heat and cooking options. That being said, the FIREfly Health stove can be constructed from as little as 6 cans. We estimate a build time of about 3 hours without any prior experience working with these materials. The final FIREfly Health stove has successfully been used to cook eggs and meat, boil water, and heat other things — all while directing smoke up the chimney and away from the cooking area. Even though the FIREfly Health stove has not yet been verified or approved by any organization, the design of the FIREfly Health stove follows the World Health Organization’s guidelines for indoor air quality and household fuel combustion.

The fly in FIREfly Health refers to how fast the stoves heat and how easy they are to make. We have created a simple pamphlet explaining the benefits of the FIREfly Health stove with detailed instructions on how to build it. With future support, we hope to make the pamphlets available in more languages. We want to ensure that the FIREfly health stove is accessible to anyone around the world, no matter what language they speak. In practice, our mission is to have the support of the United Nations to distribute the pamphlets, can openers, and can cutters along with UN food packages. With this simple intervention, people in need of a safer stove can follow the steps outlined in the pamphlet and create the stove themselves.

The opportunity to present our project and further collaborate with the United Nations was included in winning first place in the 2023 Jacobs Teen Innovation Challenge . We made our project with the aim of achieving sustainable development goal number 3, Good Health and Well-Being. Many steps need to be taken before reaching full collaboration with the United Nations. Money donated will go to designing new iterations of the stove, bringing awareness, purchasing the necessary materials, getting a website domain, supporting our school, and general education. By donating, you can help us bring our project to the United Nations and those in need of a safe stove. The plan is that once full collaboration with the United Nations has been met, most of the donations will then be transferred to them, as they will transport the FIREfly Health stove materials to where they are needed. All additional contributions beyond our initial goal will be used to bring FIREfly Health stoves to even more people across the globe. All donations will go directly to the FIREfly Health initiative. It is crucial to spread awareness about the health consequences of poor indoor air quality and household fuel combustion. Please consider sharing FIREfly Health with a friend or family member now. We are immensely grateful for every donation and the time invested to share this project.

Thank you for your support, and every donation is greatly appreciated!

FIREfly Health