The Kyoto Box, a solar cooker which retails for €15 (about $20 USD) can boil 10 liters (2.64 gallons) of water in 2 hours.

So apart from its primary uses – cooking and water purification – it can probably be pressed into service to sterilize medical instruments.

The manufacturer, Kyoto-Energy, has offices in Indonesia, South Africa, and headquarters in Kenya, which suggests local production.

According to the WHO, 1.6 million people die worldwide annually from gases produced by indoor cooking.  ((More than half of the world’s population rely on dung, wood, crop waste or coal to meet their most basic energy needs. Cooking and heating with such solid fuels on open fires or stoves without chimneys leads to indoor air pollution. This indoor smoke contains a range of health-damaging pollutants including small soot or dust particles that are able to penetrate deep into the lungs. In poorly ventilated dwellings, indoor smoke can exceed acceptable levels for small particles in outdoor air 100-fold. Exposure is particularly high among women and children, who spend the most time near the domestic hearth. Every year, indoor air pollution is responsible for the death of 1.6 million people – that’s one death every 20 seconds.  Source: WHO Fact Sheet, “Indoor Air Pollution and Health, ” dated June 2005. ))

The Kyoto Box, then, has a number of virtues:

• no scale requirements; because they’re entirely autonomous, one or one million in use will have an effect;
• reduction of indoor air pollution deaths; and used in scale, a reduction in outdoor

  air pollution as well;

• reduction of water-borne diseases via water purification, and food-borne diseases via cooking;
• lowering of energy costs;
• where wood is used for fuel, a reduction of deforestation, with the long-term effects of mitigating flood risk and increasing the availability of lumber and tree shade