Uganda

Exposure to smoke from polluting, open fires or inefficient fuels – the primary means of cooking and heating for nearly three billion people in the developing world – causes nearly 4 million premature deaths, including more than 20,000 deaths in Uganda, every year. 

Cooking smoke 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 5,700 children in Uganda dying every year as a result of acute lower respiratory infections caused by smoke from the use of solid fuels. 

Ninety-nine percent of Uganda’s population relies on wood fuel for their household cooking and heating needs. Reliance on biomass for cooking and heating leads to environmental degradation from increased pressure on local natural resources 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 cleaner, more modern cookstoves and fuels can dramatically reduce exposure to harmful cookstove smoke, can provide myriad economic opportunities for Ugandans, and can help reduce forest degradation and slow climate change. More modern stoves and cleaner fuels also reduce the time people—usually women and girls—need to spend collecting fuel, freeing up time for income generating activities or schoolwork.

Progress

• Uganda 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:
• The Alliance has been working with the Uganda National Bureau of Standards and the Ministry of Energy and Minerals Development to improve consumer awareness and stove quality
• through a standards and labeling process.
• The Alliance and its partners are lobbying the Ugandan government to eliminate the tax on cookstoves and components used to make cookstoves and push for enforcement of the import duty reductions for clean cookstoves in the East African Community.
• The Alliance also continues to support the Uganda National Alliance on Clean Cooking, which has improved coordination of sector stakeholders and is monitoring progress for the Uganda Country Action Plan.
• The Alliance launched a behavior change campaign to encourage local consumers to adopt improved cookstoves as a way of saving energy and reducing smoke from cooking appliances. Dubbed Fumbalive (or “cook and live” in English), the campaign targeted five regions and is estimated to have reached close to five million people through roadshows, radio messages, home visits, and print and wall branding in peri-urban areas.