Goals:
* Reduce major health risks for 3000 women and children from kitchen smoke
* Improve knowledge on, access to and wider up-scaling of appropriate indoor pollution reduction technologies (focusing on improved stoves and smoke hoods)
* Establish sustainable market of indoor smoke alleviating technologies in high hills of Nepal
Background:
Indoor air pollution – especially through smoke of burning solid fuels - is a major environmental health issue in Nepal. The problem is more severe in mountain and hill areas as they also burn solid fuels for room heating in poorly ventilated kitchen. A number of alternatives to solid fuels exist but their high transportation costs, poor reliability of supply and generally poor purchasing power of households makes them unfeasible. Therefore, the most cost effective means of reducing indoor air pollution (IAP) could be better quality of solid fuel use, better insulated and ventilated homes, changing behaviour to reduce exposure of children to IAP. But lack of awareness on the problem, poor capacity to pay for alternative available technologies and lack of accessibility to appropriate technologies are the main hindering factors in the wide-scale mitigation of IAP in the high hills of Nepal. In the context, the project aims to address the problem and establish a sustainable market for smoke alleviating products, mainly the smoke hoods in the high hill areas of Dhading and Gorkha districts in Nepal.
Expected Outcome:
• Awareness creation on the adverse health impacts of indoor air pollution among rural poor and empower them to adopt appropriate interventions to bring the pollution to a safer level and thereby reduce the adverse health impacts
• Ensuring mechanisms to increase access to quality and smooth supply of the smoke hoods through sustainable market promotion, including facilitation to create a market-based institutional delivery system through promotion of reliable manufacturers and suppliers. Facilitate developmeny of linkages of customers with appropriate credit facilities through revolving fund mechanisms, local micro finance institutions and other financial intermediaries.
• Dissemination of learning of scaling-up to wider communities
Status:
Preliminary level of work to establish sustainable market of smoke hoods in Dhading and Gorkha districts in Nepal completed as following:
* Raised awareness of about 3000 people on the negative health impact of indoor air pollution and available options to mitigate this problem
* 20 local artisans have been trained to manufacture and install smoke hoods
* Agreement made with seven cooperatives to run revolving fund
* About 450 households have applied formally for loan to install smoke hoods
* Support services like capacity building training, value chain analysis etc. undertaken
Other Achievements
* Jointly with Ministry of Environment, Science and Technology, Nepal, the National Indoor Air Quality Standards and Guideline prepared.
