Clean and Efficient Cooking Technologies and Fuels Toolkit

The sector has an evolving understanding of the health impacts associated with exposure to smoke from cooking with solid fuels, the exposure reductions necessary to reduce health impacts, and the challenges in achieving such exposure reduction.

The potential health benefits of transitioning to cleaner technologies and fuels are a major motivating factor for many improved stove programs; these are also among the most challenging benefits to achieve.

Best Practices

1. Decide what health impacts, if any, you seek to achieve. Reducing respiratory health impacts requires near exclusive use of a very high quality biomass stove or clean fuel, whereas there are many more options to reduce burns.
2. Determine what cooking technologies and/or fuels are required to achieve the desired impacts, and consider additional behavior change interventions such as increasing ventilation or removing infants from smoky areas.
3. Monitor changes in indoor emissions or exposure to household air pollution to justify any claims about specific health impacts (such as respiratory disease) and to add to the sector’s limited data pool