WUNRN
Women's Refugee Commission
Safe access to cooking fuel is critical in humanitarian settings. Without it, displaced people face risks to their health, safety and well-being. Every sector, including camp coordination and camp management, food and nutrition, health, livelihoods or health, has a role to play in this issue--and sectors need to work together. The Women's Refugee Commission has developed a set of fact sheets for every sector to outline the issues involved, the problems and solutions.
The
collection, supply and use of firewood and alternative energies in humanitarian
settings has been associated with a variety of harmful consequences, including
but not limited to: rape and assault during firewood collection, environmental
degradation and respiratory and other illnesses caused by the indoor burning of
biomass materials.
These
consequences span traditional humanitarian response sectors and rarely fit
neatly into the existing mandates of operational nongovernmental agencies
(NGOs) and UN agencies. As a result, household energy-related initiatives are
often ad hoc and do not take into account the lessons learned in other sectors
or regions.
We were in
Firewood rations are distributed by the United Nations
Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Kakuma camp every 60 days but for the average
household, this ration only lasts 5-10 days. Refugee women face hard choices
once their firewood rations run out. They've been telling us that they often
resort to trading their food rations for cooking fuel in order to cook food for
their families.