'Kitchen Smoke Kills 100,000 Yearly in Nigeria'

The The Executive Director, International Centre for Energy, Environment & Development (ICEED), Ewah Otu Eleri, said on Monday that about 100,000 deaths were recorded yearly in Nigeria as a result of smoke from the kitchen.
Eleri, further disclosed that over 100 secondary schools in Nigeria have adopted energy-efficient wood stoves, as a new energy efficiency technology, that eliminates smoke from school kitchens and helps school cooks to breathe better.
Daily Times gathered from the two pilot schemes in Ebonyi and Niger States, that schools in Kwara, Nasarawa, Akwa Ibom, Jigawa and Kaduna states, have now switched over to these clean cook stoves that saves over 80 percent of wood fuel and millions of naira.
He said the results of the energy-efficient woodstove project was supported by USAID Nigeria and implemented by the International Centre for Energy, Environment & Development (ICEED).
According to the Executive Director of ICEED, the project seeks to improve the health of female cooks in schools, reduce the wood used for cooking and the emission of harmful gases that cause global warming as well as create jobs and empower Small and Medium Entrepreneur (SMEs).
“Nearly all public boarding secondary schools in Nigeria use wood for cooking.
About 30 million households depend solely on wood as a source of fuel for their daily cooking. Nearly 100,000 deaths occured in Nigeria annually as a result of smoke from the kitchen. After malaria and HIV/AIDS, this is Nigeria’s third highest killer of mostly women and children. This USAID supported project, provides an opportunity to scale up the use of clean cooking technologies nationwide,” Eleri said.
Speaking at a one-day interactive session in Abuja, Mrs. Ogbonnaya Akpa, a cook at the Government Technical College, Okposi in Ebonyi State said, “We were still cooking with traditional firewood stoves, smoke gave us a lot of problems.
Our eyes would be red and we had a lot of chest pains. Every 30 minutes, we would pour water on our heads to reduce dizziness as the smoke will make us feel as if we smoked marijuana”, she narrated. Mr Lawal Maikano, Principal, Government Technical College, Minna in Niger State, said with the new stoves, the wood they normally used for one day can conveniently be used for one week.