7 research outputs found
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Fuelwood Collection and Children's School Attendance In The Kassena-Nankana Districts of Northern Ghana
In many developing countries, such as Ghana, children spend a substantial amount of time each day performing various household activities, such as collecting water, collecting fuelwood, cooking, and washing dishes. The time burden of performing these activities has the potential to affect children’s education.
To assess the effects of time spent collecting fuelwood on children’s school attendance in the Kassena-Nankana Districts of Northern Ghana. To explore this phenomenon, I used quantitative (survey) data from the Prices, Peers, and Perception (P3) study (Dickinson et al 2018) on 300 sampled rural households in the Kassena-Nankana districts, I conducted four (4) focus group discussions in four different communities, and I used a geographical positioning system (GPS) enabled watch to map out fuelwood collection areas and measure time spent on fuelwood collection.
The focus group discussion results children are engaged in various household activities daily to support their families. Survey data show that the children engaged in household activities are collecting water (85.1%), attending to animals (63.7%), washing dishes (57.6%), collecting fuelwood (35.9%), farming (33.9%), and cooking (25.2%). Also, 84.9% of households rely on fuelwood for cooking, For the small number of households for whom I measured fuelwood collection time and distance, I found that household members travelled an average of 5.2 km and spent 4.5 hours collecting fuelwood per week. Children (especially girls) spend a significant amount of time each day performing household activities to support their families.
However, I found no direct link between fuelwood collection and children’s school attendance.</p
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Health impacts of a randomized biomass cookstove intervention in northern Ghana
Background: Household air pollution (HAP) from cooking with solid fuels has adverse health effects. REACCTING (Research on Emissions, Air quality, Climate, and Cooking Technologies in Northern Ghana) was a randomized cookstove intervention study that aimed to determine the effects of two types of "improved" biomass cookstoves on health using self-reported health symptoms and biomarkers of systemic inflammation from dried blood spots for female adult cooks and children, and anthropometric growth measures for children only.
Methods: Two hundred rural households were randomized into four different cookstove groups. Surveys and health measurements were conducted at four time points over a two-year period. Chi-square tests were conducted to determine differences in self-reported health outcomes. Linear mixed models were used to assess the effect of the stoves on inflammation biomarkers in adults and children, and to assess the z-score deviance for the anthropometric data for children.
Results: We find some evidence that two biomarkers of oxidative stress and inflammation, serum amyloid A and C-reactive protein, decreased among adult primary cooks in the intervention groups relative to the control group. We do not find detectable impacts for any of the anthropometry variables or self-reported health.
Conclusions: Overall, we conclude that the REACCTING intervention did not substantially improve the health outcomes examined here, likely due to continued use of traditional stoves, lack of evidence of particulate matter emissions reductions from "improved" stoves, and mixed results for HAP exposure reductions.
Clinical trial registry: ClinicalTrials.gov (National Institutes of Health); Trial Registration Number: NCT04633135 ; Date of Registration: 11 November 2020 - Retrospectively registered. URL: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04633135?term=NCT04633135&draw=2&rank=1.
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A glimpse into real-world kitchens: Improving our understanding of cookstove usage through in-field photo-observations and improved cooking event detection (CookED) analytics
The combustion of solid fuels in residential cookstoves is a global health and climate issue, and expanded use ofimproved cookstoves could have significant benefits locally and globally. Evaluating impacts of improved cookstove programs requires more accurately measuring stove use patterns. This work builds on and improves existing stove use monitoring methods. First, we introduce and describe a novel, in-field photo-observation sampling method designed to capture near-continuous, real-world, ground-truth stove usage information. These measurements are used to validate predictions made by electronic stove use monitors (SUMs). Second, we present Cooking Event Detector (CookED), a SUM algorithm that translates stove-temperature measurements into classifications of cooking or not-cooking. The predictive performance of the new algorithm is evaluated using results from the photo-observations and compared to existing algorithms. CookED demonstrates considerable improvement over some methods for all five types of improved and traditional stoves monitored in the study. Overall minute-level predictive accuracy of CookED ranges from 95.6% to 98.4%, depending on the stove type, while Matthews correlation coefficients range from 72.8% to 88.3%. Comparisons between predicted and observed average cooking event durations show high correlation (Pearson’s r = 0.85). These methods can be applied in a wide variety of applications, including research studies linking behavior, technology, exposure, and human and environmental health, as well as operational programs that aim to scale up improved cookstove adoption and quantify benefits.</p