[Stoves] If Stoves Could Kill

[Samer Abdelnour]

Dear all,

Below are excerpts from a Stanford Social Innovation Review blog
illuminating how stoves came to be thought a protection tool for women
and girls in Darfur and globally. It raises some important questions
designers may not grapple with on the day to day. I hope you find it
interesting.

SA


If Stoves Could Kill

Political advocacy, humanitarian intervention, and the “manageable problem.”

Samer Abdelnour | Sep. 17, 2012

Cooking up the case for Darfur’s stoves

Fuel-efficient stoves, a docile domestic technology, have been
promoted for decades as tools to combat deforestation and the negative
health effects of traditional cooking. During the Darfur crisis, they
took on an entirely new function as a technology to prevent sexual
violence. In 2005, Washington-based Refugees International (RI)
released a widely publicized call advocating stoves:

“By reducing the need for wood and emission of smoke, a switch to
simple, more fuel-efficient stoves could reduce the time women spend
collecting wood, a task that exposes them to the risk of rape and
other forms of gender-based violence.”

Backed by USAID and public donations, dozens of NGOs began to promote
stoves as a way to protect Darfuri women and girls from attack.

How did stoves come to be thought of a solution to sexual violence?

During the 1990s, in Kenya’ s Dadaab refugee camps, NGOs and advocacy
organizations (including RI) sought solutions to pervasive sexual
violence. Unable to provide comprehensive protection for women inside
the camps, RI advocated for the provision of firewood to address one
spatial dimension of rape: that which occurs when women leave camps to
gather firewood.

When Darfur emerged as a significant domestic political issue in the
US, advocacy networks—including the Save Darfur Coalition and RI—drew
from longstanding racial and gender frames to form a US-centric
understanding of the conflict as an Arab-led genocidal rape.

This, combined with the idea that firewood provision would help
prevent rape, permitted efficient stoves—for the first time—to emerge
a solution to sexual violence in Darfur. Encino-based Jewish World
Watch succinctly captures the tragic narrative:

“Women and girls who have fled the genocide in Darfur, Sudan, are
particularly vulnerable to rape while performing the critical task of
collecting firewood for cooking.”

Realizing the complexity of risk

Having spent time in Darfur researching the competitive dynamics of
stove-promoting NGOs, it became clear to me that the overly simplistic
assumptions on which stove solutions are predicated do not reflect the
complex intersection of ethnicities, violence, and gender roles.

This recognition is not without precedence.

In fact, multiple assessments reveal the provision of firewood to have
been an erroneous “solution” to rape:

“Banditry and acts of sexual violence, especially rape, were known to
occur frequently in the camps. Considerable publicity highlighted the
rape of women while collecting firewood outside the camps.”

And in a 2007 report, RI withdrew its claim, saying that in Darfur:
“There is little evidence that producing fuel-efficient stoves reduces
violence against women.”

Furthermore, in a 2009 report, Amnesty International reveals that
Darfuri refugees in Eastern Chad, also recipients of stove
interventions, are just as vulnerable to sexual violence inside camps
as they are outside of them.

No simple, global solution

In Darfur, the “stove solution” persists through a number of untruths,
including simple notions of “Arab” and “African”—and that only ”Arabs”
rape. Camps are construed as safe, and no consideration is given to
women and girls who must travel for work, to markets, or to collect
grasses. These untruths are reinforced through the work of US-based
advocacy networks and NGOs.

Amazingly, despite RI’s retraction and historical experiences,
determined US-based organizations continue to promote efficient
cookstoves as a technology that reduces incidents of rape—not just in
Darfur, but globally.

For global promotion, narratives of sexual violence are further
generalized. For example, Berkeley-based Potential Energy markets a
blanket experience of displaced women in Darfur and Ethiopia: “Outside
the relative safety of refugee camps, they are vulnerable to acts of
violence”.

It is unethical, not to mention impossible, for advocacy organizations
and NGOs to claim or guarantee that vulnerable, displaced,
conflict-affected women and girls are safe in camps, let alone that
they can be made safe through using cookstoves. Yet to step away from
this claim undermines the suggestion that stoves can “solve” rape. The
elaborate risks facing women and girls should never be simplified such
that simple technologies are thought to solve complex humanitarian
crises.

For a link to the full blog post, see:

http://www.ssireview.org/blog/entry/if_stoves_could_kill