[Stoves] Women's empowerment

[Tom Miles]

There are many other examples where stoves programs have been the vehicle for gender empowerment. This is not historical accident. Many programs are designed to enable women “to enjoy their rights to control and benefit from resources,  <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset> assets,  <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income> income and their own time, as well as the ability to  <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_management> manage risk and improve their economic status and wellbeing.” You can hear it in the testimony of women who have been given the opportunity to participate in these programs and benefit from training in the many aspects of stoves dissemination. We thank GACC and the many organizations that have incorporated women empowerment in their programs. Their programs are intended, well organized, and not just casual outcomes. Their successes and failures are recognized and documented. They deserve any and all the credit they get.   

 

Tom 

 

From: Stoves [mailto:stoves-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org] On Behalf Of Nikhil Desai
Sent: Friday, October 06, 2017 12:36 PM
To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Cc: Samer Abdelnour <samer.abdelnour at gmail.com>; Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <crispinpigott at outlook.com>
Subject: Re: [Stoves] Women's empowerment

 

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 <mailto: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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