[Stoves] Women's empowerment

[Nikhil Desai]

Tom:

Thank you. You cited a powerful example.

With or without improved cookstoves, and whether single or married, mothers
or grandmothers, poor women with limited recourse to other occupations open
to women (education and health, home cleaning and child care, janitorial or
day labor) have turned to commercial cooking all over the world, usually in
urbanized spaces.

Compared to many other activities where they have to be away from home long
periods at a time, cooking is a skill they earn money from by going to rich
people's homes twice a day, or by selling foods on the street or on
contract delivery (home-based "take out" or tiffin contracts).

To my knowledge, these options for occupational cooking began in the
mid-19th Century Europe and North America. Whether they had anything to do
with the "improved stoves" for coal and wood during the latter half of the
19th Century is worth examining; Joel Darmstadter may have something to say
on it.

Women also have key roles in the rest of the food delivery chain, not just
cooking.

Let us remember only that stoves are not for boiling water but for cooking
in a timely manner with pleasant flavors and desired temperatures. And that
the cook is also responsible for selection of foods and designing meals -
yes, even among the poor - and fetching and storing the ingredients just as
she does with fuel.

How much detail of women's lives is stripped out in order to propagate a
uni-dimensional image (or not even that, merely a statistic, like a dot)
and make some linear argument from stoves to "empowerment" is worth
pondering.

We may all have contributed to an intellectual abuse of poor women by
standardizing the cook, the meal, the fuel, the cooking tasks, and ignoring
everything else in her environment like food ingredients and water, and the
social role of food at home.

Nikhil



On Fri, Oct 6, 2017 at 5:55 AM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <
crispinpigott at outlook.com> wrote:

> The Indonesian CSI Pilot 2011-2016 about which much has already been said
> had two 'sides' in terms of its administration: a financial component (an
> award-winning Results Based Finance model) and a social science one. The
> social side was managed by the SE Asia regional head of 'Gender' Helen
> Rex-Carlson (I won't try to guess her exact title). The multiple reports
> and produced from that perspective and lend support for various options on
> how to study a community before making an intervention and how it impacted
> the market, the users and women in particular.
>
> ‎Regards
> Crispin
>
>
> There are a few adoption or impact studies online. See the July 2017 GACC
> webinar on adoption. It is not clear from earlier impact evaluations if the
> results were fed back to the stove promoting organizations and if any
> adjustments were made to improve performance and adoption.
>
>
>
> Single mothers in Central America using improved stoves to cook food for
> sale to support their family should be considered empowerment. This has
> been going on for many years.
>
>
>
> Tom
>
>
>
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