Helping Women and Girls in Developing Nations: UN Cookstove Resolution Could Have a Huge Impact

World leaders spent the better part of last week deliberating over how to speed up progress on meeting the Millennium Development Goals, charted out in 2000 and intended to be accomplished by 2015.

The bad, albeit unsurprising, news is that we’re not close to meeting these goals, which address climate change, HIV/AIDS, education, and gender equality. But the best environmental news of the week came when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, a public-private partnership to be led by the UN Foundation.

The alliance’s achievable goal is to see that clean, efficient cookstoves are used in 100 million households by 2020. To those of us who can pass up a lease for the perfect apartment simply because it has an electric stove instead of gas, such an effort might sound trivial. But about half of the world’s population is exposed to dangerous smoke from traditional stoves or open fires, which are fueled with available forms of biomass ranging from wood to dung to charcoal. Causing almost 2 million deaths annually, this ubiquitous household feature is a leading global killer. The United States government has committed nearly $51 million over five years to the effort, with inter-agency support from the State Department, EPA, DOE, and Health and Human Services.

The cookstove plan highlights the neglected intersection of environmental and public health issues, with a perfectly linear cause and effect: improve the quality of emissions, save human lives. Improving the safety and environmental impact of much of the world’s primary heating and cooking tool is a step toward meeting other hercluean development goals.

Those most negatively affected by the cookstoves are women and children, who generally prepare food and are exposed most frequently to smoke. They may travel great distances to dangerous places to gather fuel sources. Improving their health and safety allows the opportunity to more effectively pursue other significant development goals like women’s empowerment and girls’ education. As noted by the Blum Center for Developing Economies project on cookstoves for Darfur, “Every trek outside of the camps [to gather wood] leaves women at risk of rape and mutilation from the Janjaweed.”

Cookstoves are also a big contributor to environmental degradation, due both to deforestation for harvesting fuel sources (TreeHugger illuminates the link between deforestation and climate change here), and the black soot produced by partial combustion of biomass. The climate change impact of the soot, ominously called “black carbon,” is unclear, but scientists think it has a significant role in warming the planet.

Economic benefits are substantial, too. Eric Van Dusen, Innovation Director of the Blum Center, told me that if the right types of programs are put in place—perhaps a lease-to-own system that could cost a family as little as $1 per month, while they save up to $5 per month on fuel—the potential for poverty alleviation is not only an important benefit of the cookstoves, but their strongest selling point.

Introducing clean cookstoves to the developing world is not a new idea. AidWatch notes that the international development community has been talking about the technology for more than 50 years. The biggest challenge now is to guide cultural changes, turning the stove into an “aspirational” item, says Van Dusen, so that “everybody wishes they had a stove.” Integrating new technology into cooking practices that have been passed down for generations is a culturally sensitive issue. When the Blum Center originally brought their work in Darfur where people cook outdoors to Ethiopia where people cook indoors, ash on the floor was a big problem. It was easily solved with the addition of a pan, but serves as a reminder that every location will need a different technology. Depending on the fuel source—twigs, dung, firewood, or coal—different stoves apply. 

The Center for American Progress lauds the plan for its “unique blend of diplomacy, technology, research, advocacy, and economic opportunity,” praising it for paving the way as a model to “meet the needs of those who must develop in a carbon-constrained world.”

The potential impact of 100 million cookstoves is profound. But getting there will entail serious education and cultural changes that need to be carefully considered along with technology, supply chain infrastructure, and distribution.

Sara Rubin is a staff writer at Campus Progress.

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