Cleaner, ‘Greener’ Cookstoves Need Better Marketing In Bangladesh
Cooking can be hazardous to your health and to the environment, particularly if you are cooking indoors over an open fire and burning wood and dung, as many people in poor, rural areas of the world do every day.
In fact, the World Health Organization says that the smoke and gases from cooking fires in the world's poorest countries contribute to nearly two million deaths a year — that's more than malaria, as our colleague Chris Joyce reported.
But despite decades of global efforts to replace dirty cookstoves with cleaner, greener cookstoves, very few are actually using them. That's especially true in Bangladesh, where 98 percent of the population still uses traditional cookstoves, according to a recent study. So what gives?
That's exactly what Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, a professor of economics at Yale University, set out to find out.