ACT Alliance

Loy Adeke prepares the family meal on a low-fuel cooker.

Photo: Lorna Felgate/LWF/ACT

By Lorna Felgate, LWF World Service Uganda

The smells of delicious cooking waft from Loy Adeke's small mud house, where she sits stirring the bubbling and boiling food. For Loy, cooking is now a pleasurable task but has not always been so.

In Katakwi, eastern Uganda, most women cook using traditional three-stone stoves, one of the oldest and most inefficient cooking methods in the world. The stoves negatively affect the social and economic wellbeing of the women who use them, and severely impact on the environment locally and globally.

Deforestation in Uganda is taking place at an alarming rate. In the past two decades, the country has lost almost a third of its forests. With 97 percent of Ugandans relying on firewood as an energy source, tree felling for cooking is a major contributor to deforestation.

People across Uganda are destroying the resources on which they depend for survival. Deforestation leads to land degradation and soil erosion, both of which reduce agricultural productivity. This means fewer crops to harvest, less surplus to sell, and less food to eat. The inefficiency of the stoves means that, globally, high amounts of greenhouse gasses are released. With rains becoming increasingly unpredictable, people In Uganda are unknowingly contributing to making their greatest fear - a changing climate - a reality.

To help bring about the seventh millennium development goal - environmental sustainability - ACT member the Lutheran World Federation in Uganda is addressing imbalance between high levels of consumption and scarce supply of firewood.

The LWF holds courses on good environmental management and teaches local people how to build energy-saving stoves. Consuming 50-60% less firewood, these stoves are dramatically reducing tree consumption.

Loy recently had a new stove constructed in her home. She is the first to admit her life has changed. "I used to walk for hours every week to collect a huge pile of firewood. But now, it lasts for over a month," she said. Time spent collecting and carrying heavy loads of wood can now be spent on productive activities: tending the garden, washing clothes or income generating activities. Thanks to these stoves, the lives of hundreds of women are being transformed for the better.

Coupled with stove construction, LWF is promoting local reforestation projects. Tree nurseries have been established for communities to come and learn best practices of tree planting. People return home with seedlings in their arms and knowledge in their minds, equipped to create orchards of their own. Teak, neem, cassia, and calliandra trees are planted for fuel and timber. Lemon, mango and guava trees are planted to enhance people’s nutrition and to sell at market.

Tens of thousands of trees are being planted each year, meaning degraded land is being replenished and the local environment restored. Through reducing their consumption of trees and replacing those they chop down, people in Katakwi are contributing to environmental sustainability on both local and global levels.