by: Ruth Mendum
On March 11th my close friend and collaborator Dr. Mary Njenga called me to say that she was having reservations about coming to the US for a three week collaborative research exercise. We had been invited to spend a week at Michigan State giving talks and connecting with other colleagues interested in energy poverty alleviation and food insecurity in Sub-Saharan Africa. The plan was for Mary to fly in from Kenya to Detroit, I would hop a plane from State College to Detroit and we would spend the next three weeks talking and writing. On that fateful day when we decided to cancel the trip, I felt a bit foolish. Airlines had not yet agreed to refund tickets, my younger daughter was still in Sweden, and no one was talking about her leaving early. Were we being alarmist?
In the pre-covid world, my superpower was a willingness to fly long distances to remote locations to talk to women about their work sourcing firewood and charcoal to cook daily meals for their families. The environmental impact of woodfuel use and the health risks to consumers have attracted some attention, mostly in the form of attempts to change the cooking devices that a cook might use. Many of these device innovations have failed at great cost to donors and international organizations. Mary and I, working with students and collaborators, have flipped the conventional understanding of the energy poverty problem. We consider women to be experts on their own household organization and needs and thus we take ourselves to their homes where we meet with them directly to understand how they cook, why they use woodfuels the way they do and a host of related subjects. Here is a link to a primer on our work: https://www.iwmi.cgiar.org/publications/resource-recovery-reuse/special-issue/
When COVID hit we were making progress. We had gathered some initial data and secured funding to work in refugee camps in Kenya, Uganda, and Ethiopia. Building on research in urban slums and rural villages in the region, we were and are developing critical insights into women’s needs, preferences, and motivations. More importantly, perhaps, we have published and given talks at international conferences, highlighting the need to include women’s voices in energy planning. How then do we continue our research and development tasks while we are stuck in our respective countries? As I write at the beginning of June, the camps where we work are closed, food supplies have been cut, borders between East African countries have been sealed and support for UNHCR is dwindling. There is no question that when we are able to return, conditions will have changed. At the same time, there is a certain power that one can derive from spending time with women in impoverished communities.
Before Covid, we were coming to understand that vulnerable women wanted to maintain their access to firewood gathered from local forests, because it granted them a certain independence from larger systems. Fossil fuels or electricity requires devices and fuels that must be paid for with money. Carrying heavy loads of firewood from the forest looks like torment to us, but for a woman who must hunt for a few coins provided by a minimal daily wage, exchanging her physical labor for fuel grants her a kind of freedom. As long as she can walk under her load, a woman can make tea or cook what little food she has. Before COVID the idea of wanting to retain this particular kind of independence was hard to articulate. The research and policy worlds are populated by people who do not have to consider the danger of being abandoned by social infrastructures. The risk of total isolation is so low that it always seems better to increase what we can earn by purchasing “labor-saving” services. Right now, with massive unemployment and a worldwide pandemic keeping us at home, the flinty determination of rural women in East Africa to feed their families no matter what, is inspiring.
As I think about those women and the purpose of research in the development space, I hope that the current pandemic allows us in the mechanized world to reconsider our goals and values. During this pandemic, household labor of all kinds has reasserted itself, demanding the actual time and attention of those who otherwise could pretend that such tasks are accomplished by magic. If I have one wish for a silver lining to emerge from this terrible time it would be that we abandon the zero-sum, more-is-better mentality, and spend more of our time on earth concerned with human connection.
For me personally, the greatest fear is that I will never see Africa again. Maybe planes will fly but only for the few and what will international work look like behind masks and at social distance? Those are questions for which, for today, I have no answer.
Trained as as a rural sociologist with specific expertise in gender analysis Dr. Mendum’s research has been focused on the relationships between university-based researchers and communities, the creation and diffusion of scientifically valid knowledge, and, the co-creation of knowledge by and for the benefit of local people and the general public. Her work began with an investigation of plant breeders in the US and their relationships with small-scale organic and sustainable farmers in the Northeastern US. Currently her work focuses on food security and biomass energy poverty alleviation in Eastern and Southern Africa, in particular the gender dynamics of resource distribution in humanitarian settings and among communities hosting large numbers of refugees and asylum seekers.