From Fuel to Pot: an interdisciplinary partnership to address the role of solid fuel use in food preparation in the household in Kenya and Malawi

In this project, we want to understand why people in slums and settlements in Kenya and Malawi cook using solid fuel like wood, charcoal, coal and animal dung, given that it is bad for their health, so that we can develop interventions to improve the situation. This is a key aspect of the food system because more than 3 billion people in the world cook with solid fuels, since they are often the only fuel available or the only one they can afford.

The people most affected are poor people in those slums and settlements who cannot afford to connect to the grid for their cooking needs, and live in crowded spaces with limited ventilation for cooking. 3.8 million deaths every year in the world happen due to household air pollution (HAP) and it is also responsible for 50% of pneumonia deaths in children under 5. This is because children often stay close to their mothers when they cook.

Getting fuel - e.g., picking large bundles of wood- also risk damaging their growing bodies and takes young people away from schooling and socialising. Women and girls are particularly affected as they are the people in the household who usually collect fuel ( e.g. wood) for cooking and also those who cook in most low income countries. Most studies to date have introduced improved cookstoves ( stoves that require less wood or charcoal) to reduce solid fuel use, but often interventions fail because they do not take into account the fact that cooking on solid fuel is a complex issue related to the accepted behaviours and beliefs within the local community, culture and community histories.

This project will fill this gap through building an interdisciplinary Partnership across the UK, Kenya and Malawi. With this Partnership of community members, government representatives, NGOs, traditional leaders, we will identify which aspects of cooking on solid fuels are most important to local communities and where some changes can be made to improve people's well being and health. We will carry these activities:

ACTIVITY 1 focuses on learning from each other within the Team and training to local research assistants in Kenya and Malawi on the various research methods to be used in Activity 2. We will also meet with Chiefs and community representatives of the two target communities for Activity 2 (i.e. Mukuru slum (Nairobi, Kenya) and Ndirande informal settlement (Blantyre, Malawi)).

We will hold partnership building events to discuss the issues with relevant stakeholders: government representatives, policy makers, local chiefs, religious leaders, academics and NGOs.

ACTIVITY 2 will use various research methods to understand the beliefs and experiences of the 'fuel to pot' in Mukuru and Ndirande. The various methods include using photos and walking interviews to capture daily cooking experiences, measuring air pollution while cooking and 'dots' photography, which uses dots of lights on photos to show the smoke concentration produced while cooking and how it can damage your health.

During ACTIVITY 3 the data gathered in Activity 2 will be summarised and fed back to the community members of Mukuru and Ndirande, through various techniques to show data in a more visual way ( where people are less literate) and stimulate further discussion, such as pop-up exhibitions of posters/drawings made by local artists, videos, dots photography. Relevant stakeholders identified in Activity 1 will also be invited to share and participate in the discussions in Activity 3.

ACTIVITY 4 consists of partnership meetings in Kenya and Malawi to discuss, with relevant stakeholders identified in Activity 1 and any new ones, the findings and next steps to design interventions, together with the informal settlements communities, to address the most urgent aspects related to cooking with solid fuel usage.

This will lead to the partnership applying for other funding to develop and pilot the intervention in Kenya and Malawi to improve the lives of those communities.