The Silent Killer in Rural Kitchens

Smoke from open fires and traditional cookstoves fires has been a silent killer in developing countries for a very long time. There are crucial signs that the sector is a tipping point strategy to develop a thriving market for clean cookstoves and fuels. More training is needed to maximize these opportunities and transform the sector.

The use of modern cookstoves is considered a luxury in the developing world. Nearly three billion people across the developing world still cook their food the way it has been for thousands of years-over open flame or crude cookstoves.

These stoves use solid fuels like wood, coal crop residues, and animal dung. In sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, the lack of access to clean cooking fuels is the reason why the vast majority of the rural populations use these solid fuels to cook over open fires or inefficient cookstoves.

Approximately 2.4 billion people around the world, especially in rural areas, depend on wood, charcoal, dung, and other biomass fuels for their daily cooking. The largest percentage of these households cook on open three-stone fires, burning poorly hence resulting in low fuel efficiency, consequently leading to high pollution emissions.

These patterns of use, result in significant negative impacts including, indoor and outdoor air pollution, mortality, deforestation, and climate change. There are social impacts also associated with the use of open fires: particularly too much time, risk, and burden of fuel collection for children and women.

Therefore there is a need to introduce a clean cooking explication meeting the needs of users and be culturally appropriate otherwise, it will not be utilized over the long term.

Carbon Financed projects ensure that these technologies are affordable, socially acceptable, easy to use, widely available, durable, and most importantly desired. The carbon finance sector and clean energy is worth pondering.