Background Paper For Clean Cooking Market Place 2013, Nepal.
Saroj Rai, Senior Renewable Energy Advisor, SNV
Out of 5.43 million families in Nepal, 4.50 million (83%) live in rural areas and most of them have no access to any clean cooking energy. These households are using fuels like firewood, cattle dung or agro waste in traditional three-stone or metal tripod stoves. Roughly 1.78 million households are using some kind of clean cooking energy like Improved Cookstoves (ICS), biogas, kerosene, LPG and electricity. This figure is obtained by adding an estimated 450,000 households using ICS and around 1.33 million households using cleaner fuels like biogas (131,596), kerosene (55,610), LPG (1,140,662) and electricity (4,523)1, as primary cooking fuel.
Thus,roughly 3.65 million rural households are cooking in traditional stoves with fuel like firewood, dung and agrowaste and almost 2.85 million households may qualify only for ICS at least in short term and some 800 thousand households may qualify for domestic biogas, particularly those currently using cattle dung for cooking(563,126)2. Of course, solar cookers can be promoted as cooking energy solution in some mountain districts,where firewood is really scarce and biogas is also not feasible.