West Africa Dialogue on Ethanol Clean Cooking Solutions: Social, Health, Economic, Environmental and Climate Impacts
(ECOWAS Centre for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency (ECREEE)) The Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to UN of several countries is lagging behind in achieving 2030 SDG commitments and actions. The pandemic became a bottleneck in the development process of the nations. Like Africa many other countries have expressed interests to look at biofuel for alternate energy needs for both household and transportation markets. Ethanol becomes a viable, feasible, transportable and attractive alternate option due to its sustainable feedstock potential based on waste to energy options, agriculture and circular practice development impacts in rural areas, and most importantly a source of clean cooking fuel to replace the dirty primary biomass use. Similar is the commitment from West Africa region countries. With about 3 billion people deprived of access to clean cooking methods in the households and community across the globe. As per The World Bank report on Report: Universal Access to Sustainable Energy Will Remain Elusive Without Addressing Inequalities, and quoted “The state of access in the Sub-Saharan African region is characterized by population growth outpacing gains in the number of people with access, so that 910 million in the regionon lack access to clean cooking.”
While there are other national programs like improved cook stove, the ethanol clean cooking is safe, easy to made locally, price affordability with local suppliers and distributers, and coupled with ethanol cook stoves available locally is the best suited for the households and community. Largely such program will contribute to the well-being of the households towards better health, equity and gender perspectives, women empowerment, enterprise development, and also importantly address climate change, and create a value chain from Farm to Cooking. This will enable the households and the women with dirty cooking habits and get rid of kerosene and wood biomass.
Household air pollution and health key facts1:
• Around 2.6 billion people cook using polluting open fires or simple stoves fuelled by kerosene, biomass (wood, animal dung and crop waste) and coal.
• Each year, close to 4 million people die prematurely from illness attributable to household air pollution from inefficient cooking practices using polluting stoves paired with solid fuels and kerosene.
• Household air pollution causes non-communicable diseases including stroke, ischaemic heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and lung cancer.
• Close to half of deaths due to pneumonia among children under 5 years of age are caused by particulate matter (soot) inhaled from household air pollution.
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1.1. The ECOWAS region
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The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is an organization of fifteen member countries in the western Africa region.
The ECOWAS region covers a land area of more than 5 million square kilometers and is home to about 400 million people, roughly one third of Africa’s total population.
Eleven member states of the ECOWAS community are still considered Least Developed Countries (LDCs). READ MORE
Content
1. Context and Background ……………………………………………………………………………………………….. 3
2. SDG Alliance – People, Planet and Prosperity ………………………………………………………………… 5
1.1. The ECOWAS region …………………………………………………………………………………………………. 6
3. The Potential of Biofuel and Ethanol ………………………………………………………………………………. 7
3.1. Energy context of the ECOWAS region ………………………………………………………………………. 9
3.2. Biofuel energy: Linking Agriculture and Industry to Economy ……………………………………. 9
3.3. Liquid Biofuels …………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 10
3.4. Modern Cooking Solution Penetration in ECOWAS Countries ………………………………….. 13
3.5. Biofuels Market ……………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 14
Figure 1: ECOWAS Region …………………………………………………………………………………………. 6
Figure 2: Energy context ECOWAS ……………………………………………………………………………… 9
Table 1: Comparison of various ethanol types and gasoline: …………………………………………… 12
Table 2: Modern cooking solutions in ECOWAS ………………………………………………………….. 13
Table 3: List of countries with biofuel policy and law. ………………………………………………….. 14
Table 4: List of High Impact Countries in Africa and Asia. ……………………………………………. 15
EIC Webinar & Info Package
The West Africa Dialogues webinar on 29 November 2022 was participated by several Government Ministries in West Africa from the Member States, Private sector, International agencies, development sector organizations & Institutions as well as SMEs amongst others, The Honorable Speakers represented from ECREEE, UNIDO, AfDB, TENN, PGI and ICDI. Over a hundred attendees participated in this webinar, where many were present till the end of the session, for the Q&A.
The Q&A session was conducted accordingly. Most of the questions were answered, however due to the time limitation not all questions could be addressed. Nevertheless, these questions are being responded to accordingly, separately through email.
The overall feedback we received from the attendees was very positive; and for the webinar being very informative, relevant in the context. We have furthermore received genuine interests in collaboration on Ethanol for Clean Cooking.
Below, you can find the relevant information package on the content and presentation, including videos that were presented in the webinar.
Documents about development of standards:
