Across sub-Saharan Africa, hundreds of millions of people cook over open fires or traditional charcoal stoves. The fuel costs are high, the emissions are damaging, and the stoves themselves are inefficient — burning more fuel to produce less heat.

In Ethiopia, a country of 90+ million people, the demand for a cleaner, more efficient cooking solution exists everywhere. Cookstoves exist too — but most manufacturers have never reached meaningful scale. The artisanal cookstove sector has been, for most of its history, a fragmented cottage industry.

The founder of Obamastove grew up in Ethiopia, fled conflict as a teenager, and was resettled in the United States. When he had the means to send something home, he chose not to send cash. He built a cookstove company instead — creating jobs and income in the community he had left behind.

Obamastove was founded in 2007. What it built over the next two decades was not a social enterprise — it was a manufacturing operation. Stoves are built by hand, by trained artisans, at a scale no other artisanal cookstove company in the world has matched. Over 600,000 stoves have been manufactured and sold.

It is the largest cookstove company in Ethiopia — bootstrapped, founder-led, and profitable.

Obamastove manufactures and sells clean, efficient cookstoves across Ethiopia and into neighboring export markets — Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Sudan, and Kenya.

Its production model is entirely artisanal: skilled craftspeople building tens of thousands of stoves per year by hand, with no dependence on complex machinery. That model is what made scale possible without the capital requirements of industrial manufacturing.

The product is built around what customers need: a stove they will actually use, at a price they can afford, that burns less fuel than what they had before.