Foreign Minister Urges Women To Use Clean Cooking To Promote Health, Environment

The Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration Minister, Ms. Hannah Tetteh has encouraged women to use clean cooking technologies that reduce fuel emissions in order to promote their health and save them from heart and lung
diseases.

She explained that women are disproportionately impacted, when after spending long hours daily in search for fire wood, they traditionally cook in open flames for hours, emitting harmful smoke that also affect the environment.

To this end, Ms Tetteh stressed the need to empower women to cook in an efficient manner with cookstoves, thereby saving time and energy for other responsibilities and income generating activities.

The Minister was contributing to a High-Level panel discussion on "the Importance of Scale: Transforming the way half the world cooks In our lifetime" in New York on Thursday, (November 20,2012). Dubbed "Cookstoves Future Summit", it was organized by the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves and attracted people from all over the world to discuss how to stop household air pollution and dangerous cooking that kills nearly four million people every year.

"Having the right kind of cooking apparatus and fuel adoption can change people's lives", she stated explaining that when more women are empowered, the society improves. Helping the rural women, helps to make changes in the society".

She therefore tasked the private enterprises to work with the women in designing cleaner cooking and household energy facilities.

Through awareness creation, she said Ghanaians have become aware of the devastating effect of climate change and the Ghana government has been forward on this.

Against this background, the Minister said that the Ghana Sustainable Energy For All Programme was launched in 2012 as part of measures to protect the environment and primarily to advance the cause for universal access to modern energy for cooking and for productive use of energy.

With a 50 per cent rural population, she said the government is helping to make a change through awareness creation, to let the people understand what is involved in adopting the clean cooking products for their households and to accelerate the achievement of universal access to modern energy services, double the rate of improvements-in energy efficiency and the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix by 2020.

Ms. Gina McCarthy, Administrator, Environmental Protection Agency, United States said one of the major goals is to empower women to be involved in the value change. This by engaging in businesses that they run to feed their children and to also keep them healthy.

She underscored the fact that cooking for the family should not endanger any woman's health but rather serve a multiple interest.

At another session on "Why the future is now: the Need to Scale Rapidly" Nii Darko Asante, Director, Technical Regulation, Energy Commission, Ghana said that clean cooking has been put on a high agenda now in Ghana, with the private sector now getting funds to produce clean cookstoves.

Essentially, he said there is a programme drawn in partnership with the UNDP, Global Alliance for Cookstoves among other agencies that are promoting clean cooking.

Currently, Nii Asante said more than 50 per cent of the Ghanaian population currently rely on gas for their cooking.

At the summit are various types of cookstoves from various manufacturers.