How Mama Imade is inspiring Nigerians to switch to cleaner cooking
Meet Mama Imade – a young, energetic, and industrious mother who recently moved to Lagos with her husband and two children to start a better life. Juggling the demands of city living, growing her small business, and caring for her family and home is a constant struggle. To cook her family’s meals, she uses wood and kerosene for fuel, though she is starting to realize she could make a change to “smarter, better and faster” cooking methods like gas while keeping her cultural values – and flavors– intact.
But there are obstacles standing in her way. Can she convince her husband to support her decision? Can they afford it? How will the food taste? Will her mother-in-law approve? Can she overcome these obstacles and successfully make the “upgrade to gas”?
Mama Imade is the fictional star of the new Alliance-supported Nollywood style web series called “The Adventures of Mama Imade”. The series was developed by McCann Global Health in collaboration with Africare, who are jointly implementing a behavior change communication (BCC) intervention in Nigeria to motivate women to switch to LPG for cooking. By watching Mama Imade’s journey from more traditional Nigerian cookstoves and fuels to a gas stove, women facing similar issues can gain inspiration and confidence to make the transition to cleaner cooking.
In addition to the web series, the “Upgrade to Gas” campaign features radio programming, social media, and intensive household and community level outreach. The intervention is focused in two states in Nigeria – Lagos and Abuja – and builds from extensive research with households in those regions as well as inputs from the LPG sector in Nigeria.
McCann Global Health and Africare were awarded support via the Alliance’s Clean Cooking BCC Fund, and are part of a portfolio of grants aimed at using communication to motivate households to purchase and adopt cleaner cooking solutions. The interventions supported under the BCC Fund are externally evaluated to measure their impact on behavioral change related to clean cooking. Additional BCC-related resources, materials, and tools for anyone designing, implementing, and/or evaluating behavior change communication activities can be found on the BCC Resource Hub.
For more information on the Alliance’s behavior change communication work, visit https://cleancookstoves.org/market-development/demand-creation/behavior-change-communication.html.
About the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves:
The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves is a public-private partnership hosted by the United Nations Foundation that seeks to save lives, improve livelihoods, empower women, and protect the environment by creating a thriving global market for clean and efficient household cooking solutions. The Alliance’s 100 by ’20 goal calls for 100 million households to adopt cleaner and more efficient cookstoves and fuels by 2020. The Alliance is working with its public, private and non-profit partners to accelerate the production, deployment, and use of clean cookstoves and fuels in developing countries.
About McCann Global Health:
McCann Global Health is part of McCann Health, an integrated global network of communications professionals with decades of experience driving behavior change and creating demand for health behaviors, products and services worldwide. The McCann Health family houses the world’s most expansive expertise in health communications, spanning 35 countries and 57 offices, with extensive reach and presence in both sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.
About Africare:
Africare is a leading non-governmental organization (NGO) committed to addressing African development and policy issues by working in partnership with African people to build sustainable, healthy and productive communities. Africare engages in projects that leverage local resources for under-served communities to solve their own development challenges, prioritizing the cross-cutting themes of economic development, nutrition, water, WASH, women’s empowerment, and youth engagement.