Sarah Collins, CEO of Wonderbag, surrounded by the company's pumpkin-shaped samples.

Nearly four in five people in Africa prepare their meals over open fires or traditional stoves, utilizing wood, charcoal and other polluting fuels, but moving towards clean cooking is hard when cooking in this specific way is part of your heritage and culture.

However, the harmul fuels released by burning wood on basic stoves for hours a day in poorly ventilated spaces, lead to 3.7 million premature deaths annually worldwide, with women and children being the most at risk.

During the Clean Cooking Summit in Paris in May, over 60 countries, developments institutions and companies pledged a total of $2.2 billions to finance access to clean cooking solutions in Africa.

Despite advancements, there is a pressing need for sustainable, scalable solutions that meet local needs: “I've always believed that our solutions are in Africa, and we just need to enable those solutions to be brought to the forefront,” said in an interview Sarah Collins, which over 15 years ago came up with an easy solution still highly relevant, without even having changed or upgraded its design since its inception.

It mostly resamble a big pumpkin, although the patterns is varied and colorful for each of its sample. The Wonderbag is a deceptively simple heat-retention cooking device that requires no electricity, fire, or external energy source once the cooking process begins.

So far it 6 million Wonderbags have been deployed in communities, especially in rural areas and conflict zones.

Using a Wonderbag is very simple: after bringing a pot to a boiling point, the pot can be placed ... [ ] inside the Wonderbag where it will keep cooking for several hours.

South African founder Sarah Collins developed the idea in 2008 to address the energy needs of rural communities in South Africa: “The idea was born from necessity,” Collins shared. “I saw the long hours women spent cooking over fires and the impact it had on their health and time. I wanted to create a solution that was safe, efficient, and didn’t require constant firewood collection.”

The impact-driven entrepreneur was inspired by her grandmother, who used a similar box surrounded by cuscions in rural South Africa in the late 70s. “Heat retention cooking has been practiced in Africa for centuries—people have buried food in the ground,” she said.

She developed the design into a bag with co-creation methodology with African grandmothers living in rural areas, where the cushions were made by recycled insulation material. The cook would only need to brings food in a pot to an........

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