Nearly three billion people worldwide burn solid fuels and kerosene in open fires and inefficient stoves to cook, light, and heat their homes. Cleaner-burning stoves reduce emissions and can have positive health, climate, and women’s empowerment benefits.

Globally an estimated 2.8 billion people rely on solid fuels such as wood, animal dung, crop waste, and charcoal, as well as kerosene for cooking, lighting and heating their homes. This reliance on biomass for cooking and heating forces women and children to spend hours each week collecting wood, time that could be better spent on income generation, education, or other activities. Furthermore, the fuel costs are often much higher with traditional and inefficient stoves. Where fuel must be purchased, primarily in urban areas, families struggling to meet their basic needs can pay as much as one-third of their income to purchase sufficient fuel to cook their daily meal.

Persistent exposure to household air pollution from solid fuels and kerosene accounted for nearly 2.6 million premature deaths as a result of pneumonia, cardiovascular disease and cancers. Women and children are disproportionately affected due to greater time spent in or near the kitchen.

Additionally, the use of solid fuels and kerosene on rudimentary inefficient cookstoves also increases pressures on natural resources, contributing to environmental degradation, ecosystem destruction, resource depletion, and climate change through CO2 and black carbon emissions, as well as other hazardous pollutants.

On the other hand, clean cooking technology has the potential to make a substantial contribution to income and other economic activity. Clean cooking options include improved biomass stoves, electric stoves, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), and other cleaner-burning fuels, such as pellets or briquettes.
Replacing traditional cookstoves with CookClean Improved Biomass Stoves with more efficient technological features saves households time and money. In addition, CookClean clean cookstove and briquette fuel value chain offers new pathways for local economic empowerment. Local artisans and entrepreneurs are participating in CookClean’s products value chain, earning income from product design, engineering, manufacturing, marketing, distribution, and sales of the cook stoves and fuels.
Time spent cooking and the procurement of large amounts of fuel frequently takes the cook, mostly women, away from income generating activities or better education.

There are three main sources of cooking energy in Ghana.

(1) wood 43.3%,
(2) Charcoal 31.5% and
(3) Gas/Electricity/Kerosene 22.3% and
(4) others making up 2,9%.

According to Ghana Living Standard Survey GLSS6 20121, Ghana is said to have 6.6 million households, with 74.8% using wood as a primary source of fuel. In the urban localities, charcoal and LPG are the preferred fuels for cooking, but are more expensive. Consequently, wood remains a popular fuel for cooking. To date, improved wood-burning stove projects have been few in the country, making it prime for CookClean to scale up and take advantage of the underserved market.

Households by locality and by main source of cooking (percent) GLSS6 2012