Sobre La Roca | Who We Are

We exist to provide the people of our home, Bolivia, with simple and efficient technology in order to give them a better way to meet their needs, while they can improve their quality of life without harming the environment, and to offer an example of sustainable development to those in the rest of the developing world.

Sobre la Roca is a small business that specializes in alternative technologies for food preparation in the home. Since 1998, we have constructed ecological stoves and ovens, including solar cookers, heat-retention cookers, and efficient wood-burning stoves. Our cookers use either much less fuel than any traditional stove or oven than uses wood or gas, or none.

We construct all our cookers in our workshop, and we find locally and widely available materials to use in them.

We are not just a profit-seeking enterprise. From the beginning, we have tried to benefit principally, in conjunction, the poorest people in our society and the wellbeing of the environment.

We can see one answer that can offer solutions for many of these problems that exist in Bolivia. Ecological cookers allo their owners to use much less fuel in food preparation and lets them keep harmful smoke out of their homes, as well as its perilous health effects. In the meantime, these families use at least 50-60% less fireood every month, thus contributing minimally to deforestation. Moreover, efficient ood stoves do not contibute to global warming because of their superior ay of burning wood efficiently. Solar cookers also improve people's quality of life, especially of women ho cook with them and who have much more time in their lives to do other meaningful things.

With these ideals at heart, we have sold more than 4,000 ecological cookers since the beginning. We believe that our work can improve the quality of life of people here in Bolivia, and in all developing countries, while helping them halt the destruction of the environment.

We understand that the world is a delicte balance, one that human actions are recklessly harming. In the meantime, people in the world's poorest countries are forced to contribute to the destruction of the environment, while living every day with constant threats to their health, scarcity of food and fuel for cooking it, and in general with barriers to their ability to climb out of poverty.

We are a founding member of the Solar Cookers International Association of (SCIA), partner of the CEDESOL (Centro de Desarrollo en Energía Solar) Foundation, a participant in the Proyecto Boliviano of Alternative Energy, in the environmental campaign known as the "Kyoto Twist", and in many other studies and research on alternative technology, health, and the environment.

Since the year 2004, we have been in partnership with the CEDESOL Foundation, a non-profit organization here in Cochabamba that has the same goals as us. CEDESOL helps our business by sending volunteers who are here in Bolivia in order to better understand development and other issues, by giving technical assistance, and financial assistance.