The World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) are marking World Rural Women’s Day on 15 October 2004 by drawing attention to indoor air pollution – one of the major causes of death and disease in the world’s poorest countries.
According to the WHO, ‘while the millions of deaths from well-known communicable diseases often make headlines, indoor air pollution remains a silent and unreported killer’. Rural women and children are the most at risk.
Thick acrid smoke rising from stoves and fires inside homes is associated with around 1.6 million deaths per year in developing countries – that’s one life lost every 20 seconds to the ‘killer in the kitchen’.
Two years ago, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg the Global Partnership for Clean Indoor Air was launched with the backing of WHO and the international community. As such, a growing network of experts and organizations are responding to the challenge by finding innovative and affordable solutions that deploy cleaner stoves, fuels and smoke hoods.