Editor’s note: In this opinion piece, Judith Wanjallah notes that burning biomass fuels like wood and charcoal in traditional, poorly ventilated kitchens is the main source of indoor air pollution in Kenyan homes. This pollution has serious negative health effects, particularly for women and children, and can lead to respiratory ailments, heart disease, stroke, and early death.
Every day, millions of Kenyan families gather around their cookstoves to prepare meals—a cherished tradition that sustains households. Yet, this daily ritual comes with a hidden danger: toxic air that kills more Kenyans annually than road accidents.
Indoor Air Pollution (IAP), largely driven by the use of conventional energy sources for cooking and heating, is a silent crisis that deserves urgent national attention.
Wood-based biomass accounts for about 74% of the nation’s total primary energy supply, serving as the main energy source, especially for rural households and low-income urban communities.
Up to 95% of the energy consumed in rural areas is in the form of wood, while more than 21% of the urban population uses wood stoves as the primary source of fuel. In many homes, solid fuels are burned indoors using inefficient stoves or open fires within poorly ventilated spaces, producing numerous by-products of incomplete combustion.
Cooking is often carried out by women in such environments, where walls and roofs are frequently coated with thick layers of soot.
During cooking, it is common practice to find the women and their young children together in the kitchen; younger ones are often strapped to their backs. Prolonged stay in such environments exposes the women and their children to respirable suspended particles (RSP) resulting from the incomplete combustion of biomass fuel.
How air pollution affects women and young children
As a result of this, women and young children face a significantly higher risk of developing acute respiratory infections (ARI) due to prolonged exposure to smoke and pollutants.
Moreover, children are at a higher risk due to their low immunity status.
Your home should be a haven, not a hazard—yet for millions, the air indoors is silently undermining health, as toxic particles from cooking stoves, mould, and poor ventilation turn these rooms into danger zones.
Indoor air pollution is a major public health concern and is recognised as the top environmental risk factor. The State of the Global Air Report indicates that in 2020, it was responsible for around 23,000 deaths in Kenya, making it the country’s eighth leading cause of premature mortality.
These fuels release harmful pollutants such as carbon monoxide, particulate matter (PM) (a combination of tiny particles of dust, solids, and soot present in the atmosphere), and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) into the air which can cause respiratory and other health problems such as cancer, negative pregnancies outcomes, infertility, cardiovascular diseases, stroke, and cognitive decline.
Why Kenya should urgently transition to cleaner energy
Although Kenya has significant potential to reduce indoor air pollution, the transition to cleaner energy remains slow due to several challenges. Heavy reliance on traditional fuels, coupled with socio-economic and cultural factors, has hindered progress. In some households, cultural beliefs encourage fuel stacking, with certain foods, such as githeri (a cooked mixture of maize/corn and beans), perceived as unsuitable for cooking over LPG.
Widespread household poverty further limits the ability to adopt cleaner fuels, while slow energy infrastructure expansion, high prices of clean energy options, and the absence of strong policies to promote large-scale adoption mean that biomass fuels will likely remain in use among low-income households for years, perpetuating environmental degradation and serious health risks.
To effectively tackle indoor air pollution in Kenya and ensure a safe and just energy transition, the government should focus on increasing funding to make clean cooking technologies more affordable, raising public awareness about health risks and the importance of proper ventilation, and enhancing education and research aimed at reducing IAP in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Through coordinated action by policymakers, health practitioners, and communities, the harmful effects of IAP on the health and well-being of Kenyans can be significantly reduced.
Judith Wanjallah is a Master’s Student at the University of California, Davis, majoring in Environmental Policy and Management.
Views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not represent the editorial position of News Nine.
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