Donors make it harder for Africans to avoid deadly wood smoke

Making the cleanest the enemy of the clean

Yvonne kayaya has never seen a gas cooker. In a poorly ventilated room in her home in Kasai, Congo, she stews potato leaves over a charcoal stove no bigger than a small stool—as generations before her have done. “I sometimes cook with firewood. If I have money, I always buy charcoal,” she says, unaware that both fuels are clogging up her lungs.

Ms Kayaya is one of the 4bn people who heat their food over a smoky fire. In sub-Saharan Africa nine out of ten people cook with dirty fuel, such as wood, charcoal or kerosene. This is unhealthy. Some 2.5m-4m people die prematurely every year because of indoor air pollution, most of which is from cooking, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency (iea) and the World Health Organisation. Breathing soot is particularly dangerous for infants: worldwide it may cause almost half of all fatal cases of pneumonia among children under five.

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