BY FAITH MCCOLLISTER
For a woman living in a refugee camp, whipping up a quick lunch for her family is anything but simple. The problem is not finding food — she probably already has a bag of rations stamped with the World Food Program logo. The dangerous part is finding a way to cook it. Women venture out day after day, stripping green hills bare in their effort to find firewood. Every time they leave the confines of their camp, they become vulnerable to rape and robbery by gangs that roam outside the camp. As Carolyn Makinson, Director of the Women’s Refugee Commission, said in an interview with Voice of America, “Perhaps the worst thing about this is that these women and girls venture out knowing that this is going to happen to them. They have to venture out three or more times a week and they know that there is a good chance they will be attacked. And we know this.”
Despite the fact that every refugee family needs a way to cook food provisions, international organizations are only beginning to consider how the people under their care would do this. The Women’s Refugee Commission is spearheading the Beyond Firewood Initiative, the first attempt to address the ongoing demand for a safe, environmentally friendly fuel source in both emergencies and prolonged refugee situations. Through a United Nations-based task force and a network seeking to connect entrepreneurs’ ideas with humanitarian needs, agencies are trying to bring attention, ideas, and money to this long-ignored problem.
At a recent presentation of the Firewood Initiative’s work, Sandra Krause, Reproductive Health Program Director at the Women’s Refugee Commission, called the failure of the international community to provide cooking fuel “a terrible gap and expectation we have of women.” The danger of being raped and robbed while collecting firewood is just the beginning. With no other option for cooking fuel, women strip huge tracts of land bare of plant material, damaging the local environment and diminishing the tolerance of host governments. Firewood is not a clean-burning fuel, and breathing the smoke contributes to the respiratory infections that plague many camp residents. Adding to their risk, many women also sell firewood as a source of income, increasing the number of trips they make outside the camp. Day after day, these risks pile up, making a solution to the fuel problem an urgent health and protection concern.
In the past, a few agencies began patchwork programs to provide firewood directly to families. This proved to be an expensive and unsustainable solution, as were security patrols accompanying women on their firewood-gathering trips outside the boundaries of the camp. In a few locations agencies achieved partial success distributing solar cookers or involving refugee women in creating bio-fuel briquettes, but without grants to sustain the programs or a way to share successes and failures with other agencies, these programs usually did not last long.
The problem of fuel provision stretches across many sectors, including protection, health, environment and livelihoods. In the past, no single sector or agency took charge with a centralized strategy or means to share information. In 2005, the Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC), a resource and advocacy organization focusing on refugee women and children, took on the fuel issue, publishing case reports on Darfur and Nepal. After looking at these two refugee settings – one peaceful and forested, the other in a desert with ongoing conflict – the WRC realized that a single solution would not fit every culture and every continent. Instead, they would have to consider each situation individually, looking at what families ate, how they liked to cook it, and what happened when they left their camps to get fuel.
Since then, the Initiative has taken a significant step toward addressing the problem by involving the United Nations. The UN has established an InterAgency Standing Committee Task Force (IASC), their highest coordination body. The Task Force brings together twenty-five members from major international non-governmental organizations, the Red Cross, and UN agencies. Already, the Task Force has created guidelines to help humanitarian agencies working in short- or long-term emergencies determine what the best approach to take for providing fuel, taking into account location, culture, environment, and refugee needs.
The WRC is taking the fuel issue out of humanitarian agency conference rooms and into the business world with the development of the International Network on Household Energy in Humanitarian Settings, The Network’s website at fuelnetwork.org gives the business community a way to connect with humanitarians, giving entrepreneurs access to a previously untapped market and potentially giving refugee families better and safer fuel sources and stoves on which to cook their meals. As Erin Patrick, Senior Program Officer for the Fuel and Firewood Initiative at the WRC, conceives it, engineers, entrepreneurs and technical experts who have ideas for workable alternative fuels can share them through the network and access information on the website about fuel needs in different refugee settings. Staff of agencies providing services to refugees can peruse new ideas and share ideas on what will and will not work in for their beneficiaries.
The Network has already attracted innovators to the cause. Dave Franchino, president of Design Concepts, Inc., contacted the network with a unique idea: he had developed the FlameDisk, small bricks of ethanol fuel for tailgating, and wanted to know if they might be useful in emergencies. Similarly, developers of solar cookers are working to adapt their product to be useful in refugee camps, based on feedback from agencies and refugees who have already tried them. In December 2008, the Initiative brought together people from many different worlds: academics, scientists, and UN and humanitarian staff, to discuss new ways to provide alternatives to firewood in refugee camps.
Without funding, though, even the best ideas will not make it out of the warehouse and into camps. Patrick warns that there is “no magic fuel” that is right for every refugee setting worldwide and that further research and evaluation of new fuel alternatives is key to developing evidence for what works in different cultures and communities and thereby convincing donors to support the programs.
As a desire for sustainability gains popularity worldwide, the Initiative’s efforts to make refugee camps more “green” and safe also increases momentum. Every day that goes by without discovering solutions means more meals, more firewood, and more risk for refugee families. Patrick is adamant about putting this issue at the forefront of humanitarian work. “We can’t keep distributing food meant to be eaten and not giving women access to fuel to cook that food.”