Stories by Etta Michael Bisong
Abuja
Over 100 secondary schools in Nigeria have now adopted energy efficient woodstoves to eliminate the negative impact of smoke during cooking and help improve the quality of food as well as health of the cooks and students.
Beginning with Ebonyi and Niger, schools in Kwara, Nassarawa, Akwa Ibom, Jigawa and Kaduna states have now switched over to these clean cookstoves that saves them over 80% of wood fuel costs, time and millions of Naira.
These remarkable achievements are part of the results of the Energy Efficient Woodstove Project supported by USAID Nigeria and implemented by the International Centre for Energy, Environment & Development (ICEED).
The project seeks to improve the health of female cooks in schools and pilot households; reduce the wood used for cooking and the emission of harmful gases that cause global warming; as well as create jobs and empower SMEs.
Executive Director of ICEED, Ewah Eleri, said “Nearly all public boarding secondary schools in Nigeria use wood for cooking. About 30 million households depend solely on wood as a source of fuel for their daily cooking. Nearly 100,000 deaths occur in Nigeria annually as a result of smoke from the kitchen. After malaria and HIV/AIDS, this is Nigeria’s third highest killer of mostly women and children. This USAID supported project provides an opportunity to scale up the use of clean cooking technologies nationwide.”
The project specifically aimed to reduce the health burden that traditional use of wood in open fire causes.
According to Mrs. Ogbonnaya Akpa, a cook at the Government Technical College, Okposi in Ebonyi State, “When we were still cooking with traditional firewood stoves, smoke gave us a lot of problems. Our eyes would be red and we had a lot of chest pains. Every 30 minutes, we would pour water on our heads to reduce dizziness as the smoke will make us feel as if we smoked marijuana.”
With support from USAID, the Governments of Ebonyi and Niger States have developed policy frameworks for expanding access to clean cooking to nearly one million households in the two states.
The project has also contributed to the development of the National Clean Cookstoves Market Development Programme in collaboration with the Nigeria Infrastructure Advisory Facility and the Nigerian Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. When implemented, the programme will provide access to clean cooking for 17.5 million households in the country.