Understanding the barriers to clean cooking in informal settlements – Case Studies from Freetown and Kampala

Cooking in informal settlements in African cities is typically not supported by large-scale, networked infrastructure (Luther Okore, 2022). Instead, it relies on the efforts of rural villagers and small-scale entrepreneurs to provide fuel, typically charcoal and wood, to the customers and locally produced stoves (Munro, 2020, Pemagbi, 1989). Biomass fuel is the original pay-as-you-go energy resource, consumers able to pay for what they use on a daily, weekly or monthly basis depending on the cash available (Luther Okore, 2022). Despite the push from many agencies to encourage the transition to clean cooking from health, safety, cost and environmental perspectives, this change is slow to occur (Batchelor, 2019).
To understand the opportunities and barriers for clean cooking in informal settlements, a series of surveys and interviews were conducted to understand how energy services are accessed and used in two communities, Portee Rokupa in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and Kinawataka in Kampala, Uganda. This was undertaken as part of the ESRC Beyond the Networked City project (ES/T007656/1). The data collected demonstrates the socio-economic challenges faced by communities living in informal settlements when considering improved cooking solutions, which are not able to either build on the existing cooking fuel entrepreneur networks or provide the economic flexibility afforded to consumers by biomass fuels. The key barriers to this transition are the initial capital cost, with many households struggling to afford their current cooking solutions, and a lack of understanding around clean cooking technologies with ‘clean’ fuels suffering issues around their reputation, LPG is often believed to be dangerous and electricity seen as expensive and unreliable. Households are required to build their own resilience and redundancy when cookstoves fail, a regular occurrence in both cities, and manage with fuel price and quality which varies throughout the season. However, consumers are keen to transition to energy saving cookstoves, which would reduce the energy cost and poor health burdens on households.