Within the Global South, cultural norms often limit women and girls to domestic roles, including cooking cleaning, caregiving, and childcare. Within these domestic roles, women bear the responsibility of gathering scarce sources for cooking such as wood, dung, and water – often up to 10 hours per week for fuel and 6 hours per day for water, creating time poverty. With intensifying energy poverty and water scarcity, this often requires longer travel distances with heavy loads, contributing to increased safety and gender-based violence risks. For energy security, informal solutions such as burning plastic waste have emerged. Both traditional and unconventional sources emit harmful chemicals, particulates, and greenhouse gases, creating environmental sustainability and public health crises through household and outdoor air pollution, food and water contamination, and consequential human exposure. Health impacts such as respiratory illnesses, cancer, other non-communicable diseases, and low birth weights have been linked to air pollution. From their domestic responsibilities and greater time at home, women, girls, and children are disproportionately exposed. Social and economic gender inequality impedes on education, income generation, and other opportunities. This project attempts to address these environmental, social, and health issues for women, girls, and their broader communities.

The World Health Organization suggests that a staggering 93.6% of Vanuatu’s population relies on polluting fuels with over 295 deaths annually caused solely from indoor air pollution. Thus, identifying paths forward for clean cooking in Vanuatu with women at the centre of solutions is critical.

Project

Project details, including collaborators, will be updated on this site upon project completion.