Moyna’s manual on clean cooking

A few hundred taka every month might not sound too much to an urbanite. But for a poor family who live in a remote sleepy village, this money means the difference between a new sari for the lady or much needed stationery for the primary school-goer kid. Let alone the physical labour that the members of these families, starting from the toddler to the veteran, have to put in to carry the load of enough wood for cooking the day’s big meal. “Starting from working in the paddy fields to working as domestic aide in rich people’s households, I have done every kind of work in my life, especially after getting married,” said Moyna Rani Mondol, a 55-year-old woman from the south-western Satkhira district in Bangladesh. “There was a time when I had to live in a constant fear – would I be able to get the fuel-wood for the day? That fear drove me to think otherwise – find a permanent solution to the fuel crisis,” said Moyna while talking to the Dhaka Tribune recently. A woman with almost no education, Moyna won the Joyeeta Award this year for inventing an energy-efficient earthen stove for village households that has cut fuel consumption by more than half for an entire village. Moyna does not know what is going on around the world. She has absolutely no idea that hundreds and thousands of experts are spending billions of dollars every year on just to find ways to tame the raging apocalypse – the global climate change. Jargon like low-carbon technology and energy-efficiency do not ring any bell in her mind. But what she has done – with pure local knowledge – is bound to make all those highly-educated experts jealous. There is no magic in the stove she has invented – just the chamber where the fuel burns has an energy-efficient design, which makes sure that most of the heat generated remains inside the chamber instead of escaping. And that significantly cuts the amount of fuel-wood needed for cooking. Joyeeta – the Bangla word for a “victorious woman” – is an initiative of the Ministry of Women and Children Affairs of Bangladesh with an overarching objective of empowering women to promote gender equality. In rural Bangladesh, which constitutes more than 80% of the country’s total area, people are usually dependent on organic fuel like wood, straw and cow-dung for cooking. But there has been an excessive use of fuel wood and a resultant destruction of trees for a number of decades, understandably because of the growing pressure of population. In the 1980s, from a similar concern, Bangladesh Council of Science and Industrial Research (BCSIR) invented a low-carbon stove for village people. It was called Bondhu Chula – the friendly stove – which several development agencies promoted in rural Bangladesh. But none of these development agencies have ever come to Moyna. Neither does she know anything about the structural design of that friendly stove. What she has invented was purely driven by a strong urge to reduce the amount of money and energy that she and her family have over the years spent on just to ensure the fuel for daily cooking. “It is amazing how an illiterate housewife from a sleepy village can think like an expert. All over the world, scientists are spending billions of dollars on finding a sustainable solution  to energy-efficiency. And here, this woman, has done exactly that,” said Syeda Rizwana Hasan, the Ramon Magsaysay award-winning environmental activist from Bangladesh. “Just make the chamber energy-efficient. It is that simple,” said Rizwana, who is also the chief executive of Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers’ Association (BELA). Moyna, who won a divisional environment award of the government last year, now works as a trainer with a number of renowned non-governmental organisations in the south-western parts of Bangladesh, to promote her low-carbon cooking stove among village women. She makes several kinds of stoves – starting from those with one chamber to eight chambers – and they all consume less than 50% fuel than conventional stoves. Initially, she used to make these stoves for herself, but soon her neighbours got interested and now around 6,000 families and more than 100 restaurants in the Satkhira district use her stoves. She makes these stoves with cement pipes, iron rods and clay – and they cost just Tk400 to Tk500. “It is ironic that such wonderful application of local knowledge is happening in a country that is among the least responsible for the global climate change,” said Ahsan Uddin Ahmed, panel scientist of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). “Time has come for us to take these local heroes and their superb works to the global arena. This is resilience in the true sense of the world,” said Ahsan, who is one of the reviewers of the IPCC’s 4th and 5th Assessment Report. He said this technology should be spread across the country.