More than two billion people cook using solid fuels: twigs, agricultural residue, dung, coal and so on. Over 1.6 million people die as a direct result of indoor air pollution every year. Raising awareness about the dangers of indoor smoke and encouraging people to take action to alleviate it could save many lives.

Practical Action (formerly the Intermediate Technology Development Group) has developed a framework to strengthen people living in poverty to work together to address these problems. This approach, using a model which is both sustainable and commercially-oriented, ensures that people participate at all levels of decision-making, leading to a sense of ownership both of the problem and potential solutions. Women in particular are supported through this approach.

The project worked with communities in Kenya, Sudan and Nepal to identify, install, and monitor sustainable interventions to alleviate smoke. Working with local partners ensured informed and sensitive handling of social and cultural issues. The project also tested a participatory framework, both to see if it could be applied in very different situations and to try to develop research that led to sustainable infrastructure, instead of just to the simplistic counting of new stoves.

Monitoring has been an important part of the work, ensuring that all the options being promoted are really having a positive effect. The various communities chose quite different solutions to their problems, adapting them to their particular needs and commercial realities. Interventions common to Kenya and Nepal included fuel drying, reducing personal exposure, and using more fuel-efficient stoves.

The research highlighted the follow outcomes:

• Interventions significantly reduced indoor air pollution, but actual levels varied by country and technology.
• There is evidence of better health, improved comfort and cleanliness, and time saved in participating households.
• Kenyan beneficiaries adopted a wide range of technical options, including very low cost ‘fireless cookers’, intermediate cost windows and eaves spaces to improve ventilation and light for chores, and more costly and metal smoke hoods.
• In Nepal, space heating is needed, so participants were interested in insulation, in addition to improved stoves and smoke hoods.
• In Sudan, liquid petroleum gas (LPG) stoves were universally adopted in the project areas, with nearly 1,000 households adopting this cleaner fuel without subsidy within the project period and an infrastructure for commercial distributions through women’s groups that was set up.

The project is now expanding the successful interventions commercially, and developing other popular solutions further. In order to ensure the projects are expanded, the following considerations are important:

• While smoke reduction was a key factor for the project team, important factors for people who benefited were increased prestige and confidence, time savings, and cost savings.
• Partnerships and collaboration have been vital to the project, and will be even more valuable during the scaling-up phase.
• Findings should be disseminated through many different means at local, national and international levels.

Developing cost-effectiveness, supply chains, skills, revolving funds and so forth, is important, as well as monitoring growth in infrastructure and sales, alongside improvements in health.

Source(s):
‘Smoke, health and household energy. Volume 1: Participatory methods for design, installation, monitoring and assessment of smoke alleviation technologies’, compiled and edited by Liz Bates, Practical Action (formerly Intermediate Technology Development Group), May 2005 Full document.

Funded by: Department for International Development, UK

id21 Research Highlight: 10 February 2006

Further Information:
Liz Bates
Practical Action
Schumacher Centre for Technology and Development
Bourton Hall, Bourton-on-Dunsmore
Rugby, Warwickshire CV23 9QZ, UK

Tel: +44 (0)1926 634400
Fax: +44 (0)1926 634401
Contact the contributor: liz.bates@itdg.org.uk

Practical Action/ITDG, UK

Other related links:
'Putting energy at the heart of poverty reduction'

'Smoke alarm – tackling the dangers of indoor air pollution'

'Smoke filled kitchens: improving indoor air quality in western Kenya'

'What energy systems are appropriate for poor villagers?'

Practical Action - Energy