Three-stone fire and its health consequences

First of all, sorry for the delay in updates! I spent last month doing research in remote communities in Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia, where internet connectivity is very limited.

One of the places that my two great team members, Gaby and Ade, and I visited was Soe. There we had the chance to interview 127 women in 12 remote communities. The main goal of these interviews was to understand their cooking methods, preferences and needs.

A fact that really shocked me was that 93 percent of the women that we talked to use three stone fire to cook, as seen in the image above. The main problem with this method is indoor air pollution and its consequences. Specifically, indoor biomass cooking smoke is associated with many diseases, such as respiratory illnesses and cancer, and women and young children are affected disproportionately.   

Trying to understand better the magnitude of this problem, I found some interesting pieces of data. Women and children in developing countries are exposed each day to pollution from indoor

cooking smoke up to 20 times higher than the maximum recommended levels (WHO 2005). Moreover, smoke from cooking fuels is estimated to account for nearly 2 million deaths annually, more than 99 percent of which occur in developing countries (WHO and UNDP 2009).

One of the ways to solve this problem is replacing traditional cookstoves with biomass cookstoves and this is what Kopernik is trying to do in Eastern Indonesia.