I never stop to get surprised when I see the way schools are still cooking their daily meals. Yesterday I visited a school in Wakiso with 2,500 boarding secondary children, that is willing to move away from their traditional stoves.
I had to share the shocking pictures of the amount of firewood used. The pictures below show a saucepan of 800 litres capacity, boiling water for tea. That saucepan alone uses 4 trunks of trees to make that happen, and this is prepared every day, no exceptions. If that amount of firewood is needed to make tea alone, you can imagine the quantities wasted to prepare food. It is devastating.
A simple intervention of helping schools move away to using institutional improved coo stoves (IICS) can achieve 2 trees being saved every day for making that same tea. There are 22,000 schools in Uganda cooking like this. With children moving around the kitchens, indirectly inhaling all the smoke and pollutants from the inefficient firewood burning….
