Kenya

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 16,600 deaths in Kenya, every year. 

Cooking smoke contributes to a range of chronic illnesses and acute health impacts such as early childhood pneumonia, emphysema, lung cancer, bronchitis, cardiovascular disease, and low birth weight. Women and young children are the most affected, with more than 4,900 children in Kenya dying every year as a result of acute lower respiratory infections caused by the smoke from the use of solid fuels. 

Eighty percent of Kenya’s population relies on solid fuel for their household cooking 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 Kenyans, 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

Kenya 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 worked with local partners and the Clean Cookstoves Association of Kenya to encourage government officials to remove or reduce taxes and tariffs that impede the growth of the clean cooking sector.
• The government has also prioritized clean cooking as a key intervention for realizing its emissions reduction target under the Paris Agreement.
• Working with local and international partners, the Alliance is helping to create a labeling program for clean cooking technologies. The program will provide consumers with easy-to-understand information on stove and fuel performance to help them make informed purchasing decisions.
• The Alliance has awarded three Catalytic Small Grants to boost capacity, three grants from the Alliance Enterprise Market Fund for brand-building and marketing efforts, and supported two women-owned businesses from the Alliance’s Women’s Empowerment Fund.
• In its 2016-2017 budget, the Kenyan government announced the removal of the 16% value added tax (VAT) on LPG
• The Kenyan government reduced the import duty on efficient cookstoves from 25% to 10%, and placed a zero-rating VAT on clean cookstoves, raw materials, and their accessories in an effort to make the cooking technologies more affordable.