Clean Cooking Reduces The Amount Of Time That Women Spend Collecting Firewood

In most homes around the world, cooking is the responsibility of women and girls.

The same is true in developing countries, where more than half of all families rely on polluting open fires or inefficient stoves to prepare meals. As a result, women and girls often suffer the greatest consequences. Not only are they exposed to toxic smoke while cooking, but they can spend hours every day collecting wood or other fuels — thus taking away time that could otherwise be spent on education, paid work, child care, or rest.

While cooking with cleaner, more modern stoves and fuels is not a silver bullet to the challenges that many women face, it can be an enormous help. Clean cooking not only contributes to gender equality, it also supports other Sustainable Development Goals, such as good health and well-being, affordable and clean energy, and climate action.

In fact, clean cooking helps deliver on 10 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. 

But don’t take our word for it. Take a look at what women in rural Kenya had to say about their experiences with clean cooking. As part of a study by the Clean Cooking Alliance—hosted at the UN Foundation—and the Berkeley Air Monitoring Group, women used camera phones and shared testimonials to document how cooking with a BURN Kuniokoa stove helps save energy, improve health and safety, free up time for income-generating activities, and even contribute to changing