Exposure to smoke from polluting, open fires or inefficiant fuels – the primary means of cooking for nearly three billion people in the developing world – causes nearly 4 million premature deaths each year, including 18,000 deaths in Ghana, every year.

Exposure to smoke from cooking contributes to a range of chronic illnesses and acute health impacts such as early childhood pneumonia, emphysema, cataracts, lung cancer, bronchitis, cardiovascular disease, and low birth weight. Women and young children are the most affected, with more than 2,200 children in Ghana dying every year as a result of acute lower respiratory infections caused by the use of solid fuels.

More than 80 percent of Ghana’s population relies on solid fuels for their household cooking needs. Reliance on biomass increases pressure on local natural resources, leading to environmental degradation, and forces women and children to spend many hours each week collecting wood. Inefficient cooking also contributes to climate change through emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane, and aerosols such as black carbon.

Clean Cooking Can Help

The use of clean, more modern cookstoves can dramatically reduce fuel consumption and exposure to harmful smoke, can provide myriad economic opportunities for Ghanaians, and can provide many environmental and climate benefits. More modern stoves and cleaner fuels also reduce the time people, usually women and girls, need to spend collecting fuel, allowing greater time to devote to income generating activities or schoolwork. 

Progress

Ghana has seen steady advancement in transforming the cookstoves and fuels sector in the past five years, here are some of the accomplishments and activities so far:

• Partnering with Ghana Alliance for Clean Cookstoves (GHACCO), to improve the locally produced Gyapa-style cookstove through a variety of innovations to further increase efficiency and reduce emissions
• Supporting enterprise development through the Alliance Spark Fund, foster investment-ready entrepreneurs through capacity building and the Alliance’s Catalytic Small Grants Facility
• Ghana’s Petroleum Minister launched a program to provide households with cooking gas connections, so far the program has distributed 70,000 LPG cylinders to families across six regions.
• Partnering with World Education International and the Ministry of Education to launch a project to teach students the benefits of clean cookstoves and fuels.
• Working with an international coalition to integrate household air pollution into the air quality management program for Accra, Ghana’s capital.
• Partnering with the Ministry of Petroleum, National Petroleum Authority, and Global LPG Partnership to develop and implement a new cylinder re-circulation LPG policy
• Partnering with Energy Commission and Ghana Standards Authority to help develop local standards, labeling, and modern testing centers