Fuel-efficient stoves' double benefit in northern South Sudan
Boosting food security while protecting the environment
“It’s so small. Will it even cook a whole pot of food?”
That was 27-year-old Awien Mawien’s first thought when the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) provided her with a fuel-efficient cookstove in November.
But one month later, the pregnant mother of four is enthusiastically listing its benefits as she stirs up a pot of bubbling beef stew in front of her thatched hut in Aweil in South Sudan’s Northern Bahr El Ghazal State.
“I can cook two meals using the same amount of charcoal I used to use for one,” she says in her native Dinka. “It’s easy to use and it heats up so fast.”
So far in 2020, FAO has distributed 1 495 such stoves in Northern Bahr El Ghazal as part of the Sustainable Agriculture for Economic Resiliency (SAFER) project funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Meanwhile, to increase the adoption of clean cooking practices, FAO trained 30 women to produce the stoves using local materials, taught them basic business management principles, and constructed a small building for them to use as a store.
The stove, which stands just under a foot tall, is made from stainless steel and shaped like a cylinder. It works by trapping the smoke produced by burning charcoal and forcing it back into the combustion chamber where it is then converted to energy. As a result, it requires between 20 and 50 percent less fuel than a well-tended fire, depending on the conditions of use. It reduces carbon monoxide emissions by 26 percent and particulate emissions by 60 percent.
In addition to its obvious environmental benefits, research indicates that using a fuel-efficient stove in contexts like South Sudan is also correlated with improved food security and decreased exposure to violence. Families who purchase fuel save money. Families who forage for their own fuel – a task generally relegated to women – spend less time hiking through remote areas.
As she cooks, Mawien chats with her mother, who recently broke her leg and is lounging on a woven grass mat in the shade. She stands and stirs with one hand on her hip, swollen belly popped, pausing occasionally to wave her wooden spoon to punctuate the conversation. Her youngest, a chubby-cheeked three-year-old, toddles back and forth between the two women.
Mawien grew up on the front line of the Second Sudanese Civil war, which culminated in South Sudan’s independence in 2011, so her childhood memories are marred by frequent air raids and loss. She was married at just 14, because her parents, whose own agro-pastoral livelihoods had been destroyed over decades of conflict needed the cattle they’d earn from her traditional dowry. She gave birth to her first child at 16.
Throughout South Sudan’s own civil war (2013-2018), Northern Bahr El Ghazal managed to escape the worst of the violence. But it was not spared from the socio-economic impact of the conflict, which drove country-wide poverty rates from 51 percent in 2009 to 82 percent in 2016. Even now, two years after a peace agreement was signed, close to 61 percent of households in Mawien’s county of Aweil Centre are estimated to be facing emergency or crisis levels of acute food insecurity.
Food remains Mawien’s main worry as a mother. Her husband, the family provider, is a day labourer. If he doesn’t find work for a day, she says, they don’t eat.
“It is hardest for my youngest,” she says. “She cries and cries until I give her food.”
The stove has helped – if only in a small way.
Previously, Mawien could only afford to feed her children one meal per day, she says. Now, because she’s able to stretch each bag of charcoal further, she can serve two meals when her husband’s work is steady. In case it’s not, she’s started storing away some of the money she’s saving on charcoal.
Meanwhile, Mawien’s husband is participating in a dry-season vegetable growing programme offered under SAFER. In the long term, she hopes the skills he learns will translate into steadier work.
“I want my children to have an easier life than I have had,” she says.
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