BIMBILNA (Eritrea): Grandmother Lemlem Ghilazgi used to spend hours every day hunting for scarce firewood around her small village in southwest Eritrea. The Horn of Africa nation has lost 95 per cent of its forests in the last 100 years because of drought, a growing population and a 30-year battle for independence during which many trees were chopped down to deny hiding places to combatants.

A third of Eritrea’s population — more than one million people — were uprooted by the conflict with neighbouring Ethiopia, putting even more pressure on dwindling resources.

But now a local cooking innovation is making life easier for women like Ghilazgi and her neighbour Madaddu Cere as they struggle to survive grinding rural poverty.

“When you bake injera now, it is really good,” said Cere, offering visitors pieces of the pancake-like bread, cooked in a modified version of the mogogo traditional clay stove.

The original mogogo stoves are smoky and dangerous and often difficult to start, sometimes needing kerosene to get going.

The award-winning new mogogo uses half as much firewood, insulates the flames and makes better use of ventilation, Cere said. “We don’t get all the smoke,” she added happily.

Thick smoke from stoves and fires inside homes is associated with around 1.6 million deaths a year in developing countries, two United Nations agencies said last year.

Families can contract fatal lung diseases from burning solid fuels that give off toxic gases in their poorly ventilated kitchens, the agencies said, estimating the risk to be the equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

The new mogogo stoves are also safer because the flames are enclosed, protecting curious children from burns.

The stove looks like a waist-high clay box which keeps the firewood off the ground and channels the smoke through an exhaust pipe, releasing it away from the structure. Wood, twigs, leaves and animal dung can be burnt in the mogogo.

Designed by Eritrean researchers, the improved stove won a British environmental award in 2003.

“It takes much less time because it contains the heat,” says Ghilazgi, proudly showing off one of 130 stoves donated as part of a pilot project set up by the Eritrean government, British embassy, the Catholic church and the charity Care International.—Reuters