• A previous project that ran from 2018-2022 showed significant health and gender equity gains by adoption of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) for cooking.
• The 5-year programme dubbed CLEAN-Air (Africa) will focus on addressing barriers to adoption of clean modern fuels for resource poor households.
Kenyans who rely on relies on wood, charcoal and kerosene for cooking are set to benefit from a clean energy initiative.
A team of global researchers from the University of Liverpool has begun a national roll out of access to Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) targeting cooking by poor households.
This is after a previous project that ran from 2018-2022 showed significant health and gender equity gains by adoption of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) for cooking.
It also had significant benefits for the environment, from reductions in deforestation and pollutants from burning solid fuels.
The team received approximately Sh1 billion to rapidly scale clean energy access in Sub Saharan Africa including Kenya in an effort to improve health, gender equality and arrest the problem of climate.
The project will be co-directed by researchers from the Kenya Medical Research Institute (Kemri) and other partners from Kenya, Cameroon, Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda.
The 5-year programme dubbed CLEAN-Air (Africa) will focus on addressing barriers to adoption of clean modern fuels for resource poor households.
This is after previous studies led by the University of Liverpool indicated that exposure to household air pollution from burning these fuels is one of the biggest risk factors for global disease and is responsible for more than two million premature deaths annually.
“After effectively training community health workers in air pollution, health and prevention across Kenya we now plan to reach 130,000 community health workers to complete the training under Kenya’s Universal Health Coverage,” Dr James Mwitari said.
Mwitari is a senior research fellow based at Kemri and co-Director for CLEAN-Air (Africa).
“The potential for primary and secondary prevention of household air pollution related disease at a community level is substantial and we have already seen examples of how lives have been saved through this education,” he added.
The funds will also be used to establish an Air Pollution Centre of Excellence at Kemri that will house state-of-the-art air monitoring equipment and training facilities.
The centre will be used by academicians, public and private sector organisations from Kenya and across Africa to conduct their own air quality monitoring and research.
A previous study by the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) found that people who cook with fuels like wood are at risk of suffering considerable damage to their lungs from breathing in dangerous concentrations of pollutants and bacterial toxins.
Despite sustained campaigns to have people switch to clean energy such as LPG, poverty and reluctance to change established habits combined with a lack of information on the impact of such fuels on lung health have continued to hamper the campaign.
“We have partnered with ambitious commercial innovators in East Africa who are making clean cooking both accessible and affordable to the poorest populations. These companies use smart-meter technology allowing households to pay for cooking with LPG in small amounts,” Professor Daniel Pope said.
“As the customer base is scaled in our East African focus countries, we will be identifying health, gender and climate gains from the transition to clean cooking,” he said.
Pope is the director of CLEAN-Air (Africa) and Professor of Global Health at the University of Liverpool.
The CLEAN-Air (Africa) Unit will expand its programme from Cameroon and Kenya to other East African countries with national targets to scale clean cooking under SDG7 including Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda.
The Unit will build on the success of CLEAN-Air (Africa)’s community air pollution prevention program that was implemented across all 47 Kenyan counties.
Other research partners include Moi University, University of Dar es Salaam, Makerere University, Lung Institute, Rwanda Biomedical Center and Eagle Research Center and the Douala General Hospital from Cameroon.