Clean and safe cooking for Nigerian families87 percent of Nigeria‘s population, mainly poor people, lack access to clean cooking methods. Often, they cook on inefficient cookers over open fires. The resulting smoke hurts the health of women, who traditionally spend more time at home and are responsible for cooking. For this reason, this project was created on the initiative of local women, providing more clean and efficient cookstoves in Nigeria and involving women as important stakeholders and sales agents.
The stove model is available in five different sizes, depending on the needs of the households or small businesses where it is used. In addition to less smoke, the new cookstoves also have other benefits for the local population: due to the higher efficiency of the stoves, local people save time and money – cooking is faster and less fuel is needed. In addition, the use of the improved cookstoves saves about 604,520 tonnes of CO2 annually.
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.
