Improved cooking stoves in Kenya
Context
In Kenya, only 13.42% of the population have access to clean fuels for cooking. Instead, the majority of people, particularly in rural areas, cook over three-stone, open fires.
These traditional stoves generate a large amount of smoke within the home due to poor combustion efficiencies. The use of solid fuels for cooking – such as charcoal, crop waste or dung – is a primary risk factor for deaths and ill-health from air pollution. This presents a health hazard for the local people – primarily women – who use the traditional stoves, and also releases harmful emissions into the atmosphere.
Project
The Aberdares clean cookstoves project helps to provide clean cooking technologies for people living in the Aberdare Range, Central Province, Kenya.
The project will distribute approximately 23,000 improved cookstoves to domestic users. These stoves are based on a permanent structure of bricks and mortar and require less wood fuel than traditional stoves to cook a meal. This will reduce the amount of fuel that is burnt for cooking, reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases. An estimated 73,833 tonnes of CO2e will be prevented from entering the atmosphere each year because of this project activity.
Improving fuel efficiency will also reduce wood collection and deforestation within the local area. Part of the Aberdare Range is an indigenous forest and collection of firewood places a great strain on the local ecosystem and biodiversity.
A further co-benefit of this clean-cooking project is the reduction of indoor air pollution within the homes of the local people. This will improve the respiratory health of those that use the stoves on a daily basis.
Verification
This project is verified by the Gold Standard. You can view it on the Gold Standard registry here.
Climate solution #21
Improved clean cookstoves
Improved clean cookstoves can address the pollution from burning wood or biomass in traditional stoves. Using various technologies, they reduce emissions and protect human health.
Around the world, 3 billion people cook over open fires or on rudimentary stoves. As these burn, often inside homes or in areas with limited ventilation, they release plumes of smoke and soot liable for 4.3 million premature deaths each year. Traditional cooking practices als produce 2 to 5 percent of annual greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.
A wide range of “improved” cookstove technologies exists, with a wide range of impacts on emissions. Advanced biomass stoves are the most promising. By forcing gases and smoke from incomplete combustion back into the stove’s flame, some cut emissions by an incredible 95 percent.