WUNRN
Women's Refugee Commission
SAFE STOVES INITIATIVE FOR DISPLACED
WOMEN, FOR
COOKING SAFETY, HEALTH, &
PERSONAL SECURITY
Written by Erin Patrick, Senior Program Officer, Fuel & Firewood Initiative - September 24, 2010
I met a Somali woman in the Ifo refugee camp in
Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton put this issue in the spotlight this week when she
announced the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, which
aims to provide 100 million fuel-efficient stoves to people in developing
countries by 2020. These stoves will make a crucial difference in the lives of
the people who receive them—especially those who have been displaced by armed
conflict and natural disasters.
At the
Women’s Refugee Commission, we have been dedicated for the last five years to
making sure that displaced women have both safe access to cooking fuel and safe
stoves to cook with. Women and girls risk rape and sexual assault when they
leave the relative safety of refugee camps to gather firewood, which they use
to cook the food provided by relief agencies – usually rice, grains or beans,
but always items that have to be cooked in order to be eaten. As nearby trees
are chopped down to use as firewood, women and girls must walk farther and farther
to collect cooking fuel, increasing their vulnerability and causing massive
environmental degradation. Burning wood on open stoves also produces toxic
smoke, exposing the women and children who spend hours near the fires to
respiratory and other illnesses, causing countless burns and house fires and
spewing black carbon into the atmosphere.
We are
currently working with the World Food Programme (WFP) on its SAFE Stoves Initiative,
which aims to ensure that six million displaced women and school children in
When we
met with the refugees at Ifo, they stressed the difficulty of obtaining
firewood, and reported frequently having to sell some of their food rations to
get money to buy wood for cooking. When they can’t afford to buy firewood,
women must walk four to five hours to collect it. “When there’s no money and
your child is crying of hunger, you have no option but to go to the bush,” one
woman said. She told me that firewood collection was the riskiest part of
their day, explaining, “When you leave in the morning, you never know if you’ll
come back safe.”
The
women that I talked to stressed that fuel-efficient stoves significantly
reduced the amount of time they spent collecting firewood. “If we don’t use a
fuel-efficient stove, the wood we collect will only last two to three days,”
explained the chairwoman of Ifo camp. “With a stove, it might last up to seven
days.” She added, though, that many people in the camp had not received stoves,
especially the thousands of new families arriving in the camp every week from
war-torn
The new
Global Alliance on Clean Cookstoves is an important step on the road to
providing a basic tool that can improve the lives of the women I met in Dadaab
and countless others like them around the world. We applaud the
And as
a member of the Alliance, the Women’s Refugee Commission is further stressing
the importance of ensuring not only that women receive clean cookstoves, but
that they also have safe access to the fuel required to use these stoves.