Whenever I visit a school kitchen using traditional 3-stone fires to cook the children meals, and spend a couple of hours with the cooks measuring saucepans and discussing their needs, the following day I end up with a terrible headache and flu, as a result of indoor air pollution.

Burning firewood in traditional stoves emit large quantities of health-damaging particulate matter and climate warming pollutants (e.g. black carbon) into the kitchen environment, increasing the risk of respiratory illnesses, including childhood pneumonia and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cardiovascular diseases, and lung cancers.

Global burden of disease estimates have found that exposure to household air pollution due to cooking on inefficient biomass stoves led to an estimated 4.3 million deaths in 2012. This does not include risks related to the use of inefficient lighting like candles or kerosene lamps (WHO).

Yesterday I visited a secondary school in Nsangi who recently joined Simoshi’s Project Activity. I want to share the pictures of their kitchen before and after, and the smiles of the cooks now as they tell me how their “new office” feels like as the smoke drastically reduced inside the building from burning firewood.