But clean stoves are back on the agenda, and in September 2010 Hillary Clinton announced the formation of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, which calls for 100 million additional homes to adopt clean and efficient stoves and fuels by 2020.43 This is a laudable aim, but if it is to be implemented, and if women are actually to use the stoves, a lot of work still remains to be done, not least on data collection.
A 2014 UN publication notes that, relative to data on water and sanitation, country data on access to efficient cookstoves is ‘sparse’, with national energy policies and poverty reduction strategy papers tending to focus on electrification instead.44 According to a 2005 World Bank report when it comes to collecting data on people’s access to energy governments also tend to measure things like the number of new grid connections, rather than the socio-economic impact of development projects.45 They also don’t generally collect data on what user needs actually are (for example, drinking-water pumping; food processing; fuel collection) before starting on their development projects. And the result of this dearth of data is that, to date, clean cook stoves have nearly all been rejected by users.
In the 1990s Emma Crewe was informed by stove technicians that low adoption was because users came from a ‘conservative culture’.46 They needed ‘educating’ in proper stove usage. Women are still being blamed in the twenty-first century. A 2013 WASHplus-and USAID-funded report on user experiences of five stoves in Bangladesh repeatedly acknowledged that all five stoves increased cooking time and required more attending.47 This prevented women from multitasking as they would with a traditional stove, and forced them to change the way they cooked – again increasing their workload. Nevertheless, the main and repeated recommendation of the report was to fix the women, rather than the stoves. The women needed to be educated on how great the ‘improved’ stoves were, rather than stove designers needing to be educated on how not to increase women’s already fifteen-hour average working day.48
Despite what academics, NGOs and expatriate technicians seem to think, the problem is not the women. It is the stoves: developers have consistently prioritised technical parameters such as fuel efficiency over the needs of the stove user, frequently leading users to reject them, explains Crewe.49 And although the low adoption rate is a problem going back decades, development agencies have yet to crack the problem,50 for the very simple reason that they still haven’t got the hang of consulting women and then designing a product rather than enforcing a centralised design on them from above.51
One Indian programme failed because while the new stove worked well in the lab, it required more maintenance than traditional stoves – maintenance the designers had simply assumed the ‘household’ would take care of.52 But structural repairs in Orissa are traditionally the responsibility of men, who didn’t see fixing the new stoves as a priority, because their wives could still prepare meals using the traditional stoves. So the women went back to using the toxic fume-producing traditional stoves, while the new stoves gathered dust in corners.
The issue of gendered priorities also affects household spending and therefore, if a household will adopt a stove at all. Despite hundreds of attempts to introduce a variety of clean stoves in Bangladesh since the early 1980s, over 98% of the rural population continue to cook with traditional biomass-burning stoves.53 A 2010 study which set out to understand why, found that women ‘seemed to exhibit a stronger preference than men for any improved stove, in particular for the health-saving chimney stoves’, and were more likely to order stoves when asked without their husbands present. But when the team returned to deliver the stoves four months later, the gender gap had disappeared; women’s preferences had fallen back into line with their husbands’.
That women’s failure to adopt clean stoves may simply result from a lack of purchasing authority is backed up by a 2016 report which found that ‘female-headed households are more likely to adopt cleaner cooking solutions than male-headed households’.54 Meanwhile a 2012 Yale study found that 94% of respondents ‘believed that indoor smoke from the traditional stoves is harmful’, but ‘opted for traditional cookstove technology so they could afford basic needs’ – although this didn’t prevent the university from headlining a press release on the study ‘Despite efforts for change, Bangladeshi women prefer to use pollution-causing cookstoves,’ as if the women were perverse rather than lacking in purchasing authority.55 Perhaps silly women obstreperously choosing air pollution for no good reason made for a better headline than endemic poverty.
This decades-long failure to design either stoves or implementation plans that account for women’s needs is a health disaster that is set to get worse. As climate change makes high-quality fuel increasingly scarce (because of soil erosion and desertification), women are forced to use leaves, straw and dung, which give off fumes that are even more toxic. And this is a travesty because there is no doubt that clean stoves would significantly improve women’s lives. A 2011 Yemen study found that women who lacked access to water and gas stoves spent 24% of their time engaged in paid work; this rose to around 52% for women who did have access.56 A 2016 report into stove use in India found that when women did adopt clean stoves (for example the cheap and portable Anagi 2 which has been found to substantially decrease cooking time), they had more time for social and family activities and community meetings.57 Households with clean stoves also reported sending their children to school more often.58
There is some cause for hope. In November 2015, researchers in India reported59 that they had conducted a successful field study using ‘an inexpensive (USD $1) device that may be simply placed in existing three-stone hearths’. This simple device cut wood use and smoke ‘to levels comparable to those achieved by the more expensive high-efficiency cookstoves’. This breakthrough came about as a result of filling a decades-long data gap: noting that the two decades of government attempts to implement high-efficiency cookstoves (HECs) in rural India had been largely unsuccessful, the researchers decided to investigate why.
And by speaking to women, they found out: HECs were unable to accept ‘large pieces of wood without having them split lengthwise’, an issue also uncovered in the 2013 study of five clean stoves mentioned earlier. These researchers understood that everything to do with cooking, including fuel, was the domain of women, and that since splitting wood was ‘very difficult for the women to do’, it was perfectly rational for women to ‘abandon these HECs since their traditional chulha (mud and brick stoves) have no such size limitation’.
Based on their findings they set about fixing the stove technology to fit the women. Realising that ‘a single HEC stove cannot possibly replace all of these traditional stoves’, the researchers concluded that ‘significant fuelwood reductions can only be achieved with locally customizable solutions in different parts of the world’. The result of their data-led design was the mewar angithi (MA), a simple metal device that ‘was engineered to be placed in a traditional chulha in order to provide the same airflow mechanism in the traditional chulha as occurs in the HEC stoves’.
To keep costs down (another regular concern of stove users), they constructed the device from metal washer industry scrap metal that they found in a local market ‘at one-fourth the cost of solid metal sheets’. And because of the ‘simple, bent plate design of the MA, it is easily customized to individual chulha units’. Since then, studies in Kenya60 and Ghana61 with the same device have found similarly positive results, showing what can be achieved when designers start from the basis of closing the gender data gap.
CHAPTER 8
One-Size-Fits-Men