SDG 12 IN KENYA

Osiepe village in Kisumu County is home to many households that have obtained fuel-efficient cookstoves through the Toshiba CarbonZero scheme. These include the household of Caroline Odhiambo, who lives in the village with her husband and 5 children. The family’s principle income source is subsistence farming, growing maize, vegetables and bananas for home consumption and with any surplus sold locally to earn a small amount of income.

Caroline recounts how the family’s situation has changed since getting the CZK stove: “Like everyone here, I grew up using the traditional three stone fire to cook. They a lot of disadvantages. A lot of wood fuel is consumed because fire cannot be regulated, and sometimes we would need so much fuel that we would resort to wet firewood meaning the amount of smoke was unbearable. I was often sick coughing, the kitchen walls had turned black from soot and visitors even refused to even taste my food. These traditional stoves don’t send enough heat into your pot, they just heat the air around, so we’re forced to use so much fuel. This is before we speak about the environment around Osiepe village. We used to destroy the forest so that we could just have enough firewood to cook. Sometimes in the dry season we would even cut down whole trees so that we could save that wood to use in the rainy season. You can imagine the effects on our forests with all the households in the village engaging in this wanton use of trees. With the forests disappearing, our land was drying up and agriculture was getting so difficult.”

Caroline’s story demonstrates how the 3-stone fires that were widely used before the distribution of CZK stoves were causing widespread overuse of the natural resource base, which had terrible effects on livelihoods. The destruction of forests for firewood is particularly damaging in communities dependent on subsistence agriculture to survive, because the removal of trees causes a steady decline in soil fertility and water retention, making agriculture increasingly challenging. However, since her family got the new stove, Caroline reports that their firewood use has fallen by 50%. The impact of this reduction in most households in the village is having major impacts on the forest around. Not only do households use less firewood, but they can also get by using small branches and leaves and do not need to cut down whole trunks to have large pieces of wood, as they did when using 3-stone fires.

Overall, the Carbon Zero cook stove has allowed the community at Osiepe to engage in responsible consumption of firewood, taking only the small amount of wood that they now need for cooking from the forest rather than harvesting large scale quantities due to the inefficiency of their stoves. This is turn leads to regeneration of the natural resource base, with the forest gradually re-establishing itself and benefitting the soil, thereby allowing agriculture in the area to flourish.

More information

Download the case study

Toshiba Carbon Zero Scheme

Contact us

Back to SDG 12