Every woman wants what’s best for her children – the women of Chilashe village in the Gamo zone of South Ethiopia are no different from the women in our own communities, but they face different challenges. For the women in Chilashe, cooking is normally done on an open fire on the ground, and this ‘stove’ is fed by wood gathered from local forestry. This is the way things have been done for millennia, how their mothers and their mothers before them cooked.
It’s a dirty, onerous and unhealthy way to cook. The fumes from the open flames cause eye, chest and heart disease, and little ones are prone to burns injuries as they toddle around. As the women have to hunker down to cook, they are also susceptible to burns on their legs and the uncomfortable position can often lead to miscarriages. Furthermore, these stoves are greedy and inefficient and require a lot of wood to feed them. This task usually falls to women and girls and gathering wood is backbreaking work. Oftentimes the local forestry is very depleted and so the gatherers find themselves walking greater and greater distances, always carrying heavy wood bundles on their backs.
Vita has partnered with local communities, rural development organisations, the Ethiopian Government through the Women & Children’s Ministry as well as the Water and Energy department of the local government administration to facilitate an improved cookstove programme across the region.
These cookstoves are life-transforming – their enclosed flame design is much healthier and 50% more efficient when it comes to wood consumption.
The emphasis on this programme is that the community -and in particular the women- own and drive this programme themselves and Vita is merely the facilitator, consulting with communities regarding their needs, bringing together the critical partners, assuming some of the costs and supporting all partners as they progress through the steps and long after implementation.
The most work is done in the early stages, when a community is ‘triggered’ to act. All partners gather together in a village where everyone discusses the pros and cons of the old stove and the benefits of the new ones. The challenges of converting to new stoves are discussed and they include habit, costs, and access to credit. The community draws a calendar on the ground with all the months of the year. Then they place rocks in front of the months when they have more income, such as just after harvest, as well as the months when they have the least amount of food, such as just before harvest time.
It soon becomes apparent that there is residual income only once or twice a year and it is better that families get access to their stoves now rather than wait. Even then the stoves would be beyond the means of most of the women in the village. The programme involves partnering women with local community credit unions called RuSACCOs. The RuSACCOs offer cheap credit to women for stoves that are affordable because they are subsidised. To further reduce costs, Vita facilitates the set-up of local female-led stoves co-ops where the stoves are made and organises the distribution.
Lemlem Fola is the local government co-ordinator for cookstoves in the area. “I tried to do a stoves programme a few years ago but it failed. Nobody could afford them and we had no support and no proper system. The difference this time is that all the different partners are working together so that the women can access the cleaner cookstove at an affordable price. I could never have done this on my own. The adoption rates are higher here using the community-led model – over 90% of women choose to get the new stove – more than anywhere else in Ethiopia so my department is very happy. I bought the Mirt stove myself six months ago and I am very happy with it!”
