Washington — The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is initiating research to find out whether developing world families will adopt a new cooking technology and adapt their cooking methods to save their health.
A year-old movement to introduce cleaner-burning cooking methods in the developing world aims to reduce the indoor air pollution that results from cooking on fires using wood, dung or other combustible materials. Nearly 2 million people die each year because of health problems aggravated by poor air quality in their homes. Women and children are disproportionately represented in these deaths because they are the family members who stay at home around the cooking fires.
But what and how a person cooks and how a person prepares meals is heavily influenced by traditional habits handed down through generations. Good intentions to change those behaviors likely will fail if those wishing to promote change don’t consider personal preferences, social norms and community attitudes, according to an October 17 USAID press release.
The agency has awarded grants to several organizations to conduct the social behavioral research to determine the best way to introduce the cleaner stoves so that families will adopt them, use them and thereby improve the air quality in their dwellings and avoid excessive respiratory problems.
Researchers from Duke University’s Global Health Institute and Sanford School of Public Policy will go to Uttar Pradesh, India, to study these questions. PATH (formerly Program for Appropriate Technology in Health), an international nonprofit organization devoted to improving global health, will conduct studies in Uganda. A second nongovernmental organization is also committed to that work. Impact Carbon is devoted to expanding the availability of cleaner energy technologies to reduce poverty and improve health.
The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, a public-private partnership led by the United Nations Foundation, aims to bring cleaner cooking methods into 100 million homes by 2020. The United States has contributed $50 million to the project, with further resources coming from other donor nations, host governments and corporate founding partners.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is an ardent supporter of the clean cookstoves campaign. “We all know that cookstove smoke leads to twice as many deaths as malaria,” she said in an address to a meeting about the campaign earlier this year. “We all know the human, economic and environmental toll this takes on people — especially women and children — throughout the developing world.”