Better living conditions for poor householdsMany households in Sub-Saharan Africa rely on 3-stone fires or traditional cookstoves for cooking, consuming a lot of fuel, in particular non-renewable firewood and charcoal. The high biomass consumption leads to accelerated deforestation and land degradation, loss of soil fertility and soils’ reduced ability of water retention as well as releasing greenhouse gas emissions. Further, indoor air pollution through health damaging pollutants while combusting firewood and charcoal can result in severe lung and heart diseases, which especially affect women and children, who mostly carry out cooking activities.
The project activity enables the implementation of the new 16,000 highly efficient improved charcoal cookstoves in urban and peri-urban regions of Cote d’Ivoire. This reduces the dependency on firewood as a fuel for the local community and increases the heat transfer efficiency, which results in the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Besides, the project contributes to a better economic and health situation of the families.
How improved cookstoves contribute to climate actionAccording to a statistic from the World Health Organization (WHO, 2022) around a third of the global population still relies on unsafe and environmentally harmful cooking methods. This includes, for example, cooking over open fires or using polluting cooking fuels, such as coal or kerosene. Improved cookstoves tackle this problem by using thermal energy more efficiently. Depending on the model, an improved cookstove can reduce fuel consumption by up to 70 percent, which significantly saves CO2 emissions and can lower the pressure on local forests as less firewood needs to be harvested.
Improved cookstove projects allow the distribution of the - often simple - devices made from metal or clay to households, small enterprises or community facilities. Especially for households, this has an impact beyond the CO2 reduction: better indoor air quality decreases respiratory diseases and families can save time and money as less fuel is needed. Improved cookstoves projects in the ClimatePartner portfolio are registered with international standards.
