Aact simultaneously in favor of the climate, health and the improvement of women’s living conditions. Few causes bring together such ambitions, and moreover with concrete chances of success. This is precisely the case of “clean cooking”, in other words the techniques allowing you to do without wood to cook food. Currently, 90% of Africans depend on a rudimentary method of cooking: three stones around a hearth, where wood, charcoal or manure burns. The women spend a large part of their time collecting wood and supervising the endless cooking. They and their children breathe toxic gases.
In addition to the 500,000 premature deaths per year from respiratory diseases, there are also the effects of deforestation linked to the need for fuel. This is why the summit organized on Tuesday May 14 in Paris by the International Energy Agency (IEA), in the presence of around twenty African heads of state and government, deserves to be welcomed.
Beneath anecdotal appearances, the issues are considerable: affecting women’s quality of life and health, they are also environmental. Eliminating traditional cooking practices by 2030 would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by an amount equal to those generated in a year by maritime and air transport combined. According to the IEA, $4 billion (€3.7 billion) per year would be enough to finance African families’ access to “clean cooking” by the end of the decade. As for alternative solutions, these closed fireplaces that consume less fuel or these solar stoves, gas or electricity, they exist.
But the obstacles are numerous. There is the indifference of many African heads of state to an issue which, in fact, primarily concerns women. The latter often struggle to abandon their ancestral cooking habits when “improved stoves” are made available to them.
A need for real public policies
In recent years, the financing of such equipment through the sale of carbon credits to companies wishing to offset their CO emissions2 has developped. States are also seeking to fulfill their climate commitments through aid for “clean cooking” methods in Africa. Advantageous for the image, these processes pose a moral and political problem – can we “buy” the right to continue to pollute? – and only offer a minimal part of the necessary financing. Their stated climate results also seem largely overestimated.
An instrument for decarbonization and the emancipation of women, and therefore a lever for development, the improvement of cooking systems requires real public policies in African countries, supported by aid-providing States and international institutions such as the World Bank.
At the Paris conference, $2.2 billion in new funding pledges were announced, more than half of which came from the private sector. Having succeeded in putting such a progressive issue on the table for international discussions represents an undeniable success. It remains to ensure the sustainability of funding and its relevance. This probably involves a change of approach which constitutes a new challenge: rather than the current logic based on a supply of more or less adapted materials, it is a question of starting from the real needs of African women.