What fuels the stove, fires the change: rethinking cooking for health, empowerment and climate
Figure: Women spend up to five hours a day collecting woodfuel and cooking.©FAO/Luis Tato
FAO; Michela Morese - 21/08/2025
Five hours. That's how long women in energy-poor households spend each day on cooking-related tasks—time not spent in school, earning income, or caring for themselves. Multiply that by 2.1 billion people still cooking with traditional fuels, this represents a significant barrier to progress that gets far less attention than it deserves.
It isn’t just a matter of convenience. Household air pollution from traditional cooking methods causes 3.7 million premature deaths each year. Cooking with unsustainable, polluting fuels costs the world trillions in damage to the environment and local economies, but it’s women who pay the heftiest price.
Women often spend around two hours a day collecting fuel and another three hours tending to the fire and cooking. This unpaid, invisible labour limits girls’ education and exposes them to gender-based violence.
In some communities, women are responsible for up to 91 percent of the time and effort spent collecting fuel and water for their household. On average, their workday lasts 11 to 14 hours, compared to about 10 hours for men.
The situation is critical in sub-Saharan Africa, where four in five people still cook with traditional woodfuel.
Clean cooking systems—efficient stoves powered by biogas or other clean-burning energy sources—offer a practical shift in how food is prepared, especially in regions where wood and charcoal remain the norm. These technologies reduce health risks from indoor air pollution, ease pressure on natural resources, and open up time and income opportunities for households. Yet despite their clear benefits, clean cooking solutions receive limited attention and support, leaving billions without access to something as fundamental as a safe way to cook.
FAO has documented how clean cooking systems like biogas cookstoves are making women’s lives easier, reducing the impact on forests and minimizing polluting emissions that harm both people and the planet.
Organic waste, such as animal manure or crop residues, can be fermented in a biodigester, producing biogas for cooking and leaving behind nutrient-rich fertilizer. It’s a clean, cost-effective, and climate-friendly solution.
In some countries, innovations such as converting sustainably collected crop and livestock waste into pellets and biogas have the potential to significantly expand access to clean cooking. In Rwanda, for instance, they could increase access to clean cooking fuels by up to 33 percent, while in Zambia they could meet up to the 12 percent of the country’s clean cooking fuel target.
Some studies show that switching to clean cooking solutions can save a person nearly 29 days each year in time spent collecting fuel and cooking.
FAO is working to expand access to clean cooking solutions for all, choosing fuels and technologies that fit the local needs—whether in rural areas, cities, or humanitarian settings. This includes supporting the installation of biogas systems, providing cleaner and more efficient cookstoves, piloting alternative sustainable fuels, and building local capacity for stove production and maintenance.
At the policy level, FAO is promoting key enabling practices to promote this access. A 2025 FAO study on bioethanol for clean cooking in Africa highlights some of these, including eliminating VAT and import duties on clean fuels and stoves, adopting international fuel standards, and embedding clean cooking into national food security, health and climate strategies. Results-based financing schemes and microloans have also boosted women entrepreneurs’ role in the clean cooking value chain.
Clean cooking is not just an energy or climate issue: it’s interlinked with equality, health, and opportunity. Clean cooking technologies help families prepare a wider range of meals by cutting down on cooking time, reducing fuel limitations, and minimizing harmful smoke exposure. They support better food safety and free up household budgets, enabling families to buy a greater variety of nutritious ingredients. The result is healthier, more balanced diets.
Momentum is slowly building, but clean cooking still doesn’t get the spotlight it deserves, despite being profoundly transformative.
Rural women from India shared how a humble biogas stove, running on even humbler cow manure, had allowed them to breathe easier, send their daughters to school, start kitchen gardens. Biogas cooking systems freed their time from the chore of collecting firewood, their yards from unhygienic waste, and their homes from smoke, all the while providing free fuel and fertilizer. They became climate advocates, supporting others to shift to clean energy.
Clean cooking is more than a household improvement—it’s a stepping stone toward safer, more stable livelihoods.
To make real progress, clean cooking must be included in broader conversations—about health, food security, energy access, and long-term investment in communities. The opportunity is clear. What’s needed now is the commitment to act.
Because what lights the stove, fires the change.
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