The decision to talk only to men was bizarre. For all the gaps in our data we can at least say that women do a fair amount of farming: 79% of economically active women in the least developed countries, and 48% of economically active women in the world, report agriculture as their primary economic activity.29 And the female farmers in this area didn’t see yields as the most important thing. They cared about other factors like how much land preparation and weeding these crops required, because these are female jobs. And they cared about how long, ultimately, the crops would take to cook (another female job). The new, high-yield varieties increased the time the women had to spend on these other tasks, and so, unsurprisingly, they did not adopt these crops.
The only thing that development planners need to do to avoid such pitfalls is speak to some women, but they seem bafflingly resistant to this idea. And if you think the decision to design a new staple crop without talking to women is bad, wait until you hear about the history of ‘clean’ stoves in the developing world.
Humans (by which I mean mainly women) have been cooking with three-stone fires since the Neolithic era. These are exactly what they sound like: three stones on the ground on which to balance a pot, with fuel (wood or whatever else you can gather that will burn) placed in the middle. In South Asia, 75% of families are still using biomass fuels (wood and other organic matter) for energy;30 in Bangladesh, the figure is as high as 90%.31 In sub-Saharan Africa biomass fuels are the primary source of energy used for cooking for 753 million people.32 That’s 80% of the population.
The trouble with traditional stoves is that they give off extremely toxic fumes. A woman cooking on a traditional stove in an unventilated room is exposed to the equivalent of more than a hundred cigarettes a day.33 According to a 2016 paper, in countries from Peru to Nigeria, toxic fumes from stoves are between twenty and a hundred times above World Health Organization guideline limits,34 and globally they cause three times more deaths (2.9 million)35 every year than malaria.36 This is all made worse by the inefficiency of traditional stoves: women who cook on them are exposed to these fumes for three to seven hours a day,37 meaning that, worldwide, indoor air pollution is the single largest environmental risk factor for female mortality and the leading killer of children under the age of five.38 Indoor air pollution is also the eighth-leading contributor to the overall global disease burden, causing respiratory and cardiovascular damage, as well as increased susceptibility to infectious illnesses such as tuberculosis and lung cancer.39 However, as is so often the case with health problems that mainly affect women, ‘these adverse health effects have not been studied in an integrated and scientifically rigorous manner’.40
Development agencies have been trying to introduce ‘clean’ stoves since the 1950s, with varying levels of success. The initial impetus was to address deforestation41 rather than to ease women’s unpaid labour or to address the health implications of traditional stove fumes. When it transpired that the environmental disaster was in fact driven by clearing land for agriculture rather than by women’s collection of fuel, most of the development industry simply dropped their clean-stove distribution initiatives. Emma Crewe, an anthropologist at SOAS University of London, explains that clean stove initiatives were ‘deemed to be a failure as a solution to the energy crisis, and not relevant to any other development area’.42
But clean stoves are back on the agenda, and in September 2010 Hillary Clinton announced the formation of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, which calls for 100 million additional homes to adopt clean and efficient stoves and fuels by 2020.43 This is a laudable aim, but if it is to be implemented, and if women are actually to use the stoves, a lot of work still remains to be done, not least on data collection.
A 2014 UN publication notes that, relative to data on water and sanitation, country data on access to efficient cookstoves is ‘sparse’, with national energy policies and poverty reduction strategy papers tending to focus on electrification instead.44 According to a 2005 World Bank report when it comes to collecting data on people’s access to energy governments also tend to measure things like the number of new grid connections, rather than the socio-economic impact of development projects.45 They also don’t generally collect data on what user needs actually are (for example, drinking-water pumping; food processing; fuel collection) before starting on their development projects. And the result of this dearth of data is that, to date, clean cook stoves have nearly all been rejected by users.
In the 1990s Emma Crewe was informed by stove technicians that low adoption was because users came from a ‘conservative culture’.46 They needed ‘educating’ in proper stove usage. Women are still being blamed in the twenty-first century. A 2013 WASHplus-and USAID-funded report on user experiences of five stoves in Bangladesh repeatedly acknowledged that all five stoves increased cooking time and required more attending.47 This prevented women from multitasking as they would with a traditional stove, and forced them to change the way they cooked – again increasing their workload. Nevertheless, the main and repeated recommendation of the report was to fix the women, rather than the stoves. The women needed to be educated on how great the ‘improved’ stoves were, rather than stove designers needing to be educated on how not to increase women’s already fifteen-hour average working day.48
Despite what academics, NGOs and expatriate technicians seem to think, the problem is not the women. It is the stoves: developers
