63 Degrees North14 Feb 2025

Old flames die hard – the saga of solar cookers

Jimmy Chaciga, a PhD research fellow at Makerere University in Uganda, thinks he has what it will take to get Ugandan households to adopt solar-powered cookers. First, cookers need to be simple to operate. They need to be cheap. They need to be able to cook once the sun has gone down.

But most of all, they need to be able to cook beans.

"If you can cook beans, you can cook anything," he says.

Armed with two drums, a lot of insulation, some solar panels and a dream, Chaciga is trying to bring his cooker to Ugandan households and institutions that need it the most.

Chaciga is one of a group of African researchers working with NTNU's Ole Jørgen Nydal under projects funded by NORAD, the Norwegian Agency for International Development, and the University Network on PhD Programmes in Energy Technology (UNET), co-funded by the EU's Erasmus + programme.

Here's the situation: After decades of research and funding to help households in developing countries shift away from firewood, charcoal and other biomass, 75% continue to rely on these resources for cooking.

Clearly, cooking with wood is bad. It wastes women and children's time as they scavenge scarce wood to burn.

It contributes to deforestation. It's a huge problem that seems like it should be solvable with enough smart engineering, yet it persists.

Today's episode explores the successes and challenges researchers have faced in tackling this issue.

My guests are Jimmy Chaciga, Ashmore Mawire and Ole Jørgen Nydal.

You can see videos and documents from the International Energy Agency's Clean Cooking Summit from May 2024 here.

Here are some publications describing some of the work in today's show: