Healthy Cooking Starts with the Stove

Ben Grey

Improved cookstoves ought to be one of the easy wins in global health. Inefficient, old-fashioned cookstoves do real damage to human health and family incomes. Traditional cookstoves are generally open fires in the middle of three stones, which hold the pot. The fuel is biomass (wood, animal dung, and crop waste) and coal, and the smoke and fumes cause health problems that range from burns to respiratory infections to cancer. Since most of the heat is lost to the surrounding air, they need a lot of fuel. Improved stoves, which come in all shapes and forms, direct the heat to the pot and cleaner fuels can reduce environmental and health impacts. Yet three billion people—that’s nearly half of the world’s population—still use traditional stoves. Why? It’s about human nature. The impacts of improved cookstoves appear over time, and they’re not obviously connected to the cookstoves, while the negatives of upgrading are obvious and immediate.


Clear Benefits, but Not So Obvious

Improved stoves are more fuel efficient, which means less money spent on fuel, or less time spent gathering fuel. However, it’s not easy to calculate fuel savings over time. (Do you know how much you spend per year on gas for your car?) If coal or wood are purchased in small amounts on an irregular basis, it is not obvious how much the annual cost is. If wood is gathered rather than purchased, the cost is even harder to estimate. Women and children are generally the ones gathering firewood, which takes considerable time—time that could be spent in school or running a business. In conflict areas, they also risk violence and sexual assault. However, saving a woman’s time may not have an obvious benefit in a patriarchal culture. Saving a child’s time might seem downright pointless.

The health benefits of improved stoves are equally indirect. On a macro-level, we know that respiratory illnesses, cancer, asthma, and burns are less common in communities that use improved cookstoves. Harmful cookstove smoke is one of the World Health Organization’s top five threats to public health in poor, developing countries. The WHO estimates that 1.9 million premature deaths are caused by indoor air pollution from traditional cookstoves. That is a life lost every 16 seconds. On a household level, however, the health benefits of an improved stove are not obvious. Preventing lung cancer or emphysema 10 or 20 years from now isn’t a tangible advantage, or even especially believable for many people.

Women often cook with infants strapped on their backs. Children in a household with an improved cookstove get fewer respiratory infections. However, it’s not so many fewer that it would stand out—unless you were tracking how often your own kids got sick in comparison to your neighbors’ kids. Most parents don’t habitually benchmark their children’s health.



Trees for the Future
The flank of Mount Kenya, pictured here, demonstrates how fuel collection for traditional cookstoves has led to deforestation.

Big Obstacles

The negatives of an improved cookstove, on the other hand, are immediately apparent. First and foremost, there is the cost of buying a new cookstove. Improved stoves can range from $7 (40 percent more efficient) to $100 (95 percent more efficient). Even if it’s as cheap as $25, that can be a full month’s wages. You need to save for the cookstove, or take a loan, for a new technology with unproven benefits.

Financial obstacles aside, adopting the new stove still isn’t easy. In many cases, convincing a family to change stoves means challenging some very personal traditions. In most of the world, the woman in the home does the cooking, and she will need to learn new techniques for the new stove. Even if it’s a perfect stove—well designed for the local culture and easy to use—it’s still a new stove. It will take a month or two for the household cook to get used to it. In that time, some food will turn out strangely, and some will be ruined; food the family can’t really afford to lose.

If it’s not a perfect stove, learning to use it will take a lot longer. Some traditional food may be impossible to make, if it relies on a smoky flavor that came from a poorly vented oven, for example, or on a particular smooth or crunchy texture that cannot be created with the new stove. What if you’re Ethiopian and your new stove is too small to make injera? It doesn’t matter how efficient it is, you’re not going to buy that stove. Even if someone gives it to you for free, you’re not going to use it.

The Trio: Design, Price, and Marketing

If we want improved cookstoves in as many homes as possible, we’re going to need a great design, a low price, and fantastic marketing.

The efficient stoves will need to look and handle as much like traditional cookstoves as possible, to minimize the perceived negatives in switching over. That will mean different models for different markets; one standard improved cookstove will not work for the whole world.

Next, we need the cookstoves to be affordable. It doesn’t matter how much people can save by using them if no one can buy the stove in the first place. That’s probably going to mean subsidizing the stoves. Some kind of loan for purchase might work too, either on its own or in combination with a subsidy.


In some ways, cookstoves are just an extreme example of the problem with every innovation. People don’t adopt something just because it’s good for them or economically rational. If you want people to change the way they do something, you need to show them the benefits. You need to talk them into it.


Paul Cohn
In Chennai, Dr. Balakrishnan describes the basic function of cleaner burning cookstoves to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a leading advocate of the technology.

The Good News

There’s reason to believe we can achieve the trio of good design, affordability, and solid marketing. One reason is the increase in political will and attention on cookstoves. Improved cookstoves have been kicking around international development circles since the 1940s, but the issue gained attention in 2010 when Hillary Clinton announced the launch of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, which now has 12 donor countries and over 200 implementing partners.



Lastly, people are paying attention to effective marketing. The Partnership for Clean Indoor Air (PCIA), a public-private partnership, has created a website called the Social Marketplace, which is “a collection of best practices, tools, case studies, and resources around the marketing of cookstoves and other social goods to poor consumers.” The Social Marketplace includes case studies, common barriers to adoption, and a list of dos and don’ts.


The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves aims to help 100 million homes adopt clean and efficient stoves and fuels by 2020. Let’s hope they reach their goal of 100 by ’20!