I believe the parent is referring to reflective solar stoves. There is a picture of one in the article. It's basically just a parabolic mirror and you put the food at the focal point.

The article said that the village had such stoves, but the weren't adopted for some reason. I may have missed it (I was skimming), but it would be interesting to see why they weren't adopted. My guess: having to orient your cooking around the position of the sun. Possibly the women do not have flexible enough time schedules to do it.

Parent is pretty clearly referring to using solar photovoltaic panels to generate electricity to operate an induction cooktop. Pretty sure parent grossly lacks an understanding of what global poverty is.

I knew a guy who worked in the Peace Corps in Lesotho, trying to get people to use reflective stoves. His experience is that people didn't want to use them because (a) they liked traditional cooking [who doesn't?] and (b) insofar as they had aspirations, it was to buy a propane bottle and a burner, like the middle class people in their area.

A friend of mine was in Burkina Faso for some NGO (might have been Peace Corps). Originally they tried a PV setup for some of the more rural villages. Every time they'd come back to ask how things were working the panels had been stolen and sold off. Eventually they gave up on PV altogether.