Technologies

Our technology begins where lived experience meets engineering—inside the kitchens, mountains, and daily routines of the Mazateca region of Oaxaca. By co-designing directly with the women whose health, time, and safety were most affected, we learned that technology succeeds only when it is shaped by the people who will use it every day. Through deep partnership and iterative engineering, the La Mazateca cookstove has evolved into one of rural Mexico’s most culturally grounded and trusted clean-energy solutions.

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In 2013, Planet Wise Solutions partnered with The Hunger Project–Mexico to complete a comprehensive site survey across four remote Mazateca communities in northeast Oaxaca. Families welcomed us into smoke-filled kitchens where three-stone fires consumed enormous amounts of wood, coated buildings in soot, and exposed women and children to the smoke equivalent of 15–20 cigarettes a day. Girls often missed school to gather firewood, and previous NGO stoves had failed because they ignored cultural cooking practices and quickly fell into disuse.

So we began by listening. Through household visits and community assemblies, women described exactly what they needed: a taller cooktop for comfort, multiple heat zones for tortillas, beans, and coffee, rapid boil times, and—above all—clean combustion. Two families volunteered to host early prototypes, giving us real-time feedback that shaped every design choice. The result was the first-generation La Mazateca stove, built with locally sourced refractory materials, open-source rocket-elbow efficiency, and rigorous thermal modeling.

Adoption was immediate and overwhelming. Within days of firing the first stove, more than 75 women gathered to see it in action, and demand surged to over 1,000 requests across four villages. This momentum pushed us to develop the Gen2.x La Mazateca—a major engineering leap that standardized the internal geometry using vacuum-formed casting tools, cut construction labor by over 50%, eliminated consumable materials, and reduced costs while dramatically improving durability.

What do our users have to say:

“The new stove makes cooking faster and better. It requires less time and effort [blowing] than cooking on a three stone fire.” Agripina Martinez Vasquez
“I’m very happy with my new stove. I can cook tortillas faster. The comal gets hotter faster and with less wood than the three stone fire I used to use.” Julia Venegas Carbagal
“With one small fire, I can now cook tortillas and make coffee (and keep it hot) at the same time. I used to worry about burning the tortillas, but now I can control the comal heat so they don’t burn.” Virginia Pantoja Garcia

Today, more than 300 La Mazateca stoves are in service, many now a decade old, with a >95% acceptance rate—far beyond typical rural cookstove programs. Each stove reduces wood use by up to 75%, improves indoor air quality, and fits seamlessly into the cultural rhythms of daily life. Most importantly, every stove is built on-site by locally trained Promoters—primarily women—creating income, ownership, and long-term sustainability within the community.

With a pending Mexican patent on our construction process, we are preparing to scale this model so that every family that wants a safe, efficient, culturally grounded stove can have one.

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