Comments on: Tackling a cinderella issue – lethal indoor pollution

By: Jeremy Doyle

Jeremy Doyle — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 11:00:30 +0000

Ian,

Thanks for this excellent summary.

There is still far too little attention paid to this subject. We should never underestimate the cultural diversity: solutions need to respond to what people want in order to help improve their own lives.

There is a whole lot more information at HEDON too:
http://www.hedon.info

Best,

Jeremy

By: Andree Sosler

Andree Sosler — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 16:34:37 +0000

Duncan:

Thrilled that you are addressing this issue on your blog! Did you know that Oxfam America has been working to address this issue in partnership with our organization, Potential Energy?

Together, our organizations have provided tens of thousands of cookstoves to women in Darfur, Sudan. To learn more, please see:

http://www.oxfamamerica.org/articles/what2019s-in-a-stove

and

http://www.potentialenergy.org/solution/countries/sudan/

Best regards,

Andree

By: Sam Gardner

Sam Gardner — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 17:38:30 +0000

When I was working with improved stoves, now years ago, the acceptance was good, as long as the project subsidized. We tried to work with gas stoves instead, and there was enthusiasm. According to the people getting them, they were very expensive to buy, but the gas was in the long term less expensive than wood. Most wood had to be bought in that region.

As gas stoves were no part of the project setup, the project had to revert to the improved wood stoves.

By: Ian Bray

Ian Bray — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 14:54:50 +0000

Hi Hilke

Good question. When I first encountered this issue it puzzle me as well.

“For very practical reasons people usually do not cook outside. In the dry season it’s too hot, in the rainy season it is too wet. When it is windy dust and dirt blows into the food. Animals can steal the food if it is being cooked outdoors.

On an open fire even a slight breeze blows the heat away from the cooking pot. This means that it takes ages to cook a meal and uses a lot more fuel, fuel that may have taken hours to collect. A breeze at mid-day in the sun’s burning heat means that the food doesn’t cook but the cook does.

There are also deep-seated social reasons why people don’t cook outdoors. What people eat reflects their social status and people can be very sensitive about their neighbours’ views of their status. Sometimes people may not want their neighbours to know what they are cooking as it may be seen as being inferior. In many cultures people do not like other people seeing what they are eating so seek the privacy of their home.

In some cultures fire can be considered sacred and must be at the heart of the home.”

this comes from a very handy FAQ on indoor air pollution from Practical Action – it was written some eight years ago so some of the answer may be dated
http://practicalaction.org/faq-2

By: Hilke

Hilke — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 10:20:44 +0000

This might sound like a really dumb question (and I don’t propose it as a solution as the problem is more complex), but besides the rainy season:
Why don’t people suffering from the smoke, cook on a fire OUTSIDE the hut/home to minimise their health suffering?

By: Emily

Emily — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 09:33:57 +0000

Designing and marketing clean, efficient cookstoves that people actually want to use is indeed a hard task, but there are some success stories. Experience tells us that development practitioners trying to force people to change the way they cook is a recipe for disaster, whereas creating a desirable, affordable product can be very successful. Affordable (not free) stoves designed to work with local cooking methods can be very popular – for example the social enterprise Toyola Energy in Ghana (which won an Ashden Award in 2011) has sold over 200,000 efficient stoves. They sell for as little as $7 each, and are made affordable to even the very poor with customers being offered the option of buying on credit and paying back their loan using the money saved from using less charcoal.There is a case study and video of their work here (http://www.ashden.org/winners/toyola11).

By: TB

TB — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 09:14:51 +0000

Thought I’d take this opportunity to give kudos to http://www.washplus.org/.

By: Caroline

Caroline — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 08:21:58 +0000

This is a classic example of how the gender division of labour in the home, and the invisibility of women’s role in care work, leads to a key issue for them – and ironically for children too, while they’re young and/or not spending time in school – being invisible to (predominantly male) development workers. I’m talking poor household here. In richer households where it’s the role of the (still female) servants to do most of the cooking, who cares very much about their health? And they frequently sleep in the kitchen too. Very basic stuff, and very shocking. Great you’re focusing on it. In just the same way that raising awareness of women as farmers should lead to all sorts of changes to the kinds of support to small farmers needed, raising awareness of women as processors and cooks of food should lead to changes in development agendas so that we’re looking at food as it is processed from raw materials into meals, and at the needs of the women and girls who do this work.

By: Muhammmad Abbas Khan

Muhammmad Abbas Khan — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 07:49:31 +0000

No I Don’t agree India and Pakistan can live without electricity also But don’t sold their bodies on the name of energy there are many other sources is south with a new blessing of climate change we have now more better environment to live in moon or candle light also without fan nice air outside in rural area