Each year, kerosene emits thousands of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It is also expensive and potentially deadly. Families are at risk for burns as well as asthma and pneumonia from inhaling the toxic carcinogens.
“It’s like breathing in two packs of cigarette smoke a day from infancy to adulthood,” Hirschfeld, now 19 and a student at Columbia University, told TakePart.
Hirschfeld heard about this health crisis from a neighbor in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, who ran LitWorld, a literacy program in Africa. He thought he could find a way to help people have better light. Through research, he learned that solar lanterns seemed the most obvious, and practical, choice.
“There’s no reason against using clean healthy light like solar,” Hirschfeld said. “Families aren’t paying per unit when they are using solar.”
That’s when Lit! Solar, a revolving microfinance fund that helps families replace kerosene lamps with safe, emission-free solar lanterns, was launched.
Hirschfeld partnered with his neighbor’s literacy organization and set out to raise money to buy lanterns. He and a team raised enough money at a local farmers market to send 20 lanterns to Africa with LitWorld volunteers.
To get the most for the money, Hirschfeld searched for companies that would help arrange the transport of the lanterns while offering price breaks. Currently, a lantern costs about $7 to produce.
So far, Hirschfeld’s program has provided solar lanterns to more than 10,000 people in Kenya, Fiji, the Philippines, Haiti, and even to Native Americans on reservations in the United States.
The lanterns not only benefit students, but they are also changing the lives of the students’ parents.
The doctors weren’t addressing the root problem, which was that they were breathing in the kerosene smoke every day.
Hirschfeld recounted the story of a woman named Doreen Achieng in Kenya who has been able to expand her entrepreneurial business of sewing school uniforms. Because of her daughter’s lantern, she was able to sew at night. She made enough money to buy another lantern for her relatives in rural Kenya.
The lantern also made Achieng’s family healthy again.
“She had told me that before she got the lantern, she and her school-aged daughter and infant son had all been passing back the same pneumonia,” Hirschfeld said. “The hospital medication was expensive, but the doctors weren’t addressing the root problem, which was that they were breathing in the kerosene smoke every day.”
Once the family received a solar lantern, their pneumonia disappeared.
“She told me that was the longest period of good health that they could remember,” Hirschfeld said.
Other families have started reading together as a nightly activity.
“Parents don’t have to say anymore, ‘You have finished the homework, so shut off the kerosene lamp so we aren’t spending the fuel,’ ” Hirschfeld said. “The literacy learning is now filtering up to the parents who may not be literate now.”
In July, Lit! Solar received one of the Diller Teen Tikkun Olam Awards, which was worth $36,000. Hirschfeld plans to use the money to provide solar lanterns to another 15,000 students and families in Kenya, Guinea, and Nigeria.
Currently, many volunteers around the United States lead Lit! Solar chapters in schools and colleges.
“We are always looking for people in leadership roles to bring this issue up for a discussion in their own communities,” Hirschfeld said.
“We encourage American students to start chapters in their own school to raise funds and interact with students who they help in developing countries. I hope we can find a way to provide clean, healthy light to every student and family that needs it.”