Cooking up a more efficient stove.

• Author: Chege, Nancy
• Position: Kenya ceramic jiko cookstove; 'waisted-bell' design

In 1983, a woman in Kenya complained that while she had been stirring a thick porridge-like traditional meal called ugali, her stove had tipped over. Hers was not the only one; a number of other women had the same disconcerting experience. The stoves, distributed to the women as part of a program to bring more energy-efficient and healthful cooking technology to rural areas, were subsequently redesigned in response to the women's feedback. The new stoves were given a "waisted-bell" design that made them more stable, finally providing the improvements planners had had in mind from the start.

Improved cookstoves--designed both for more efficient use of fuel and reduced health risks to users--are creating a quiet revolution in the developing world. In China, where the changeover from traditional stoves has been most rapid, more than 140 million of the new stoves are in use. In Kenya, the figure is over half a million and rising. Similar stoves are gaining widespread popularity from Guatemala to India. Around the world, women are spreading the word about these new stoves that bring both reduced fuel costs and less smoky kitchens. Biomass fuels, which include wood, other plant matter, and animal wastes, are the principal sources of energy for at least 40 percent of the world's population. Most of the biomass energy (approximately 75 percent) is used for cooking. In rural areas, the most widely used means of burning this fuel is the traditional "three-stone stove"--actually nothing more than three stones arranged in a triangle to support the base of a cooking pot. In the urban and peri-urban areas, unlike in the rural areas where both stones and wood are freely gathered, the three-stone stove is often replaced by charcoal stoves such as the traditional cylindrical metal stove of Kenya.

The problem with both the old rural stoves and the conventional urban ones is that because they allow most of the heat to escape, they are terribly inefficient. And the fuel, which burns up quickly, has to be constantly replenished. Furthermore, as the fuel burns, the stove users are subjected to large doses of smoke, which has been found by the World Health Organization to be associated with increased risk of diseases such as acute respiratory infections, which are responsible for the deaths of 4 to 5 million children every year. With the help of international aid agencies, various organizations and institutions have tried over the past four decades to produce an...