Urban Dwellers in Malawi Switching to Gas for Cooking, Taking the Pressure Off the Forests
By Deogracias Benjamin Kalima, Lilongwe
It is Saturday morning in Area 38, a suburb of Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi. Rosina Chipasula, like many other women in the area, is preparing the day’s food for her four-member family. While in her neighbours’ households the smoky scent of burning charcoal and wood are every day’s fixture, hers is a different case. She is one of the growing number of people who are moving away from the traditional three stone fire and charcoal, and switching to gas.
Touted as the game changer by government, gas is cleaner, faster and more efficient. Chipasula adopted the use of gas for cooking in 2023 after she realized the growing cost of charcoal in her area was eating her income as a public servant.
“I was driven to switch to gas due to the rising prices of charcoal here in Lilongwe which have been skyrocketing ever since. I had to find the cleaner, faster and more efficient source of energy and I discovered gas is a perfect fit,” she says.
Chipasula says while previously she was using three bags of charcoal per month costing about MK60,000 (US$30), the shift to gas has halved her cost over same period. She says having gas has also made her cooking quicker because she is able to prepare food at a go, compared to previously when she was using a charcoal burner which takes about 10 minutes to start off.
“Cooking using gas is cost effective and made me to save money I was spending on charcoal and wood. Now with 12 Kilogrammes of gas, it lasts a whole month at a cost of MK35,000 (US$17). It is faster too since it does not take even a minute to start off giving me opportunity to have enough time for other house chores.”
“Gas cooking is clean, fast, affordable and healthier as compared to wood and charcoal I have been using previously. It has made my life as working class person easier because when I return from work, I don’t have difficulties to cook making it faster. I am also playing my part in conserving the environment,” she says.
Chipasula’s story is corroborated by Condoleezza Tamandani, another cooking gas user. Unlike Chipasula, Tamandani has just started cooking with gas, two weeks after she asked her father to buy a gas cooker to replace a charcoal burner which was rarely fast enough for the preparation of breakfast meals in time for her punctuality at school.
Tamandani, a senior secondary school student, says since she started using gas, she has never been late to school as she is able to quickly prepare breakfast for her and the family. She also explains that no longer do she and her sisters experience coughs as a result of smoke coming from charcoal and wood.
“We now cook faster, cleaner and without the exposure of smoke which used to choke us when we were using charcoal and wood for cooking. There are no longer persistent coughs among us,” she tells me as she cooks Nsima, local thick porridge made from maize flour which is a staple for Malawians.
Lack of efficient and reliable clean cooking technologies in Malawi, as in much of the rest of the world, is a large problem. More than 2 billion people around the world use wood or charcoal for heating and cooking. In Sub-Saharan Africa, nearly 900,000 people, over 70 percent of the population, rely on wood or charcoal.
The use of wood-based fuel has significant negative impacts on the people’s health and the environment. Traditional cooking methods are also deeply intertwined with gender inequality and gender based violence. Furthermore, they require a significant expenditure of time and effort from women responsible for cooking and fuel collection. Collecting fuel in remote areas, leaves women and girls vulnerable to violence.
According to World Bank in its Clean Cooking Background Note, released in June 2022, the use of gas stoves reduces household air pollution, therefore lowering the risk of respiratory illnesses, particularly for women and children who are most affected. The more the people adopt cooking with gas, the less the demand of firewood and charcoal which will in turn contribute to the preservation of forests which have been depleting at alarming levels. If the forests are preserved, this helps in reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. This also spares out many women and girls from the need to gather fuel, therefore freeing up time for education, work and other productive activities.
Access to clean cooking is a development issue. It contributes to energy poverty while impacting multiple sectors such as health, climate change, gender, and environment. The 2022 Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7 tracking report shows that Malawi’s access to clean fuels and technologies for cooking was at 1 percent in 2020, with 3.9 percent of the population in urban areas and 0.2 percent in rural areas having access.
Malawi’s progress in meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals is constrained by its high dependence on biomass for cooking, leading to forest degradation and deforestation. According to the Malawi Fifth Integrated Household Survey (IH5S) 2019-2020, 98.8 percent of households were using solid fuels as the main fuel used for cooking. A higher proportion (79.1 percent) of households were using firewood, followed by 18.5 percent using charcoal, and 1.2 percent electricity. By place of residence, a higher proportion of about 90.9 percent of households in rural areas was using firewood as a fuel for cooking as compared to 18.9 percent of households in urban areas.
About 75 percent of households in urban areas were using charcoal as their main fuel for cooking, compared to 7.5 percent of households in rural areas. Most people in rural areas use the traditional three stone fire. This demand for charcoal and wood for fuel is the main driver of deforestation and degradation in Malawi.
However, as more and more people, especially in the urban areas of the country, adopt gas cooking and other modern and cleaner energy, there is a need for the authorities to put measures in place to ensure uninterrupted supply of gas in the country as pointed out by a long time cooking gas user, Osward Bosworth, who says since most of the Liquid Purified Gas (LPG) being distributed in Malawi is imported from neighbouring countries like Tanzania, sometimes there are bottlenecks which affect the gas supply chain in Malawi.
“My appeal is for government through the Malawi Energy Regulatory Authority (MERA) to put in mechanisms that will ensure sufficient and constant supply of LPG in the country so that we do not [have] constant stock-outs as it happened this year when the whole country was out of gas supply,” he says.
Bosworth says when LPG runs out, he switches to electricity. However, he says other households who do not have electricity are forced to use wood and charcoal for cooking which exposes them to choking, burns and red eye, apart from continuing to deplete the forest cover.
Recently, some public schools under the World Food Programme (WFP) school feeding programme, in the districts of Kasungu and Chikwawa, have been cooking using biogas, which has seen significant reduction of environmental footprint by the programme. This has so far seen avoidance of indoor and outdoor air pollution, a considerable threat to the health of cooks and students.