United Nations Radio

Cooking on a three-stone fire at school in Uganda

At the climate conference in Copenhagen last week, the World Food Programme unveiled a pilot project to provide fuel-efficient stoves to women in Sudan and Uganda, to reduce the risk of violence they run while gathering firewood and at the same time protect the environment. Bissera Kostova has the story.

 Duration: 4'07"

NARR: The World Food Programme announced that the so-called "SAFE" stoves will be provided immediately to 35,000 households and 50 schools in Uganda and to 100,000 women in Sudan's Darfur region. By the end of next year the Safe Access to Firewood and Alternative Energy in Humanitarian Settings (SAFE) stoves initiative will be rolled out to reach up to 6 million refugees, internally displaced people, and returnees located in 36 nations. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says this will protect women in these hazardous settings.

SG 1: Women and girls often travel great distances collect firewood. They are at risk of attacks, robbery and rape. As woodland declines, they are forced to travel further, increasing the hazard. Women using fuel-efficient stoves in North Darfur have seen a 50 per cent reduction in the need to collect firewood.

NARR: Josette Sheeran, the Executive Director of WFP, said the SAFE stoves use fifty percent less wood and reduce harmful smoke and emissions.

Sheeran: Most women cook within their homes, on open fires with stones and wood. About 15% of that fire goes to heating the food and cooking it. This causes many health problems, including the black carbon and the soot that is very dangerous and is responsible for more deaths than malaria, but also the pollution. It's counted among the three top causes of global greenhouse gases, due to the black carbon and soot.

NARR: Maria Mutagamba, the Minister of Water and Environment of Uganda said 80 percent of the population of her country is rural, and ninety percent of those households use wood or charcoal for heating and cooking. The growing population is putting a strain on Uganda's forests and wetlands. That is why Uganda has embraced the SAFE stoves project she says, but they want to go further with it.

Mutagamba: We need to improve on the input. At the moment we are using those small shrubs, dry and all that, but we want to make briquettes, so that we actually move to stage two, where we have less gases from the stove and at the same time be able to use the biomass that we get from our agricultural output like beans, maize, ground nuts - all the husks that we have we are now trying to encourage people to come up with small, small initiatives, but these small initiatives are making a lot of difference in our society.

NARR: Josette Sheeran says WFP is going along with this idea.

Sheeran: In response to the Minister's request, we have checked the briquette technology and will be training women IDPs in the Karamoja district, where it's very drought-hit, in making the briquettes, which are made as she says, of the grass and peat and food waste and other agricultural waste, and compress them to make bricks so they have a livelihood when they return home, to sell them as the briquettes, and non-wood fuel most importantly.

NARR: Antonio Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, says the SAFE stoves project is an example of the response needed from the UN system to the complex problems facing the world today.

Guterres: With a stove like this we protect women, we decrease emissions, we protect the forests and we increase food security, so we give answers with one single stove, to four different problems.

SG : The Safe Stoves project shows a virtuous circle in action, thanks to technology - environmental protection, improved safety for women, access to clean energy for the poor -- enhanced climate security. Safe Stoves is a simple, inexpensive, and win-win solution. It shows the UN system on the move, delivering results that protect lives and promise a safer, greener future for all.

NARR: UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. For UN Radio, I'm Bissera Kostova.

 WFP photo gallery on SAFE stoves
http://www.wfp.org/photos/gallery/safe-stoves