Fatimah Abdullahi, a mother of five, sits close to a smoking fireplace in the heart of Shita Community, in Kaduna State, Northwestern Nigeria. The air, thick with the acrid scent of burning wood, wraps around her like an unwelcome cloak. Here, cooking is not just a task but a test, a daily battle against forces that threaten not only the food on her table but the very breath in her lungs.
“For me from onset, I use firewood for cooking because sometimes when my husband gives me money for firewood to cook food for the family, he used to say if I can’t cook because of my condition (asthma) I should find someone to help. Sometimes when he notice the emissions is too much from the kitchen he will tell me to come out and cook outside so that there will be enough air for me to breathe in and out,” Fatimah shares, her voice steady but tinged with resignation.
For her, the simple act of cooking is a gauntlet she must accept each day; the smoke from the firewood a silent antagonist, seizing her breath and tightening her chest. When the smoke overwhelms her, she stumbles out of the kitchen, clutching her inhaler, a lifeline in the haze.
“Whenever I’m cooking and the emissions trigger my asthma, my breath use to cease and I will have to run from the kitchen to my room and find my inhaler. When I feel better, then I will now resume cooking,” she recalls.
In Shita, Fatimah is not alone in her struggle. Bara’atu, another housewife, has battled asthma for seven long years. Her days are punctuated by the same rhythm of smoke and breathlessness. The firewood she uses is both a necessity and a problem, the harsh emissions clinging to her skin, infiltrating her lungs, and endangering her young son who clings to her back as she cooks. “I do not feel comfortable with it because of the harsh emission,” Bara’atu confides. “Sometimes you find out firewood is dry and that increase the emission. And my child is also exposed to that because he’s always on my back when I’m cooking.”
The Hazards of Everyday Life
In the four walls of many houses in Shita, the air is thick not just with smoke but with the unseen, insidious dangers of Household Air Pollution (HAP), research reveals. The women here inhale it with every breath, a toxic blend of black carbon, particulate matter, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons seeping into their bodies, poisoning them slowly, imperceptibly.
Nigeria’s rural landscapes are dotted with such scenes—women hunched over smoky fires, their faces creased with the strain of breathing through the invisible fog. The prevalence of respiratory symptoms among women and children is disturbingly high, a direct consequence of the unclean fuels they rely on for cooking. The World Health Organization’s recommended limit of particulate matter (PM2.5) is a distant dream here, where levels soar to 1.6 times the safe threshold, a silent harbinger of disease.
Yusuf Usman, the community head of Shita, knows too well the toll that firewood takes. He recalls his own brush with death, smoke poisoning his lungs until he found himself gasping for air in a hospital bed. “There is one that when a man or woman inhale its smoke, it can kill because these trees are of various categories. There are harmful and non-harmful ones so since the tree is harmful, its smoke will be deadly,” he explains, his voice grave with the weight of lived experience.
The story of Shita is echoed across Nigeria, where the traditional practice of cooking with firewood persists despite its deadly consequences. Yahaya Saleh Ibrahim, the UNDP-GEF Focal Person in Kaduna State, speaks of the unseen cost that women pay, often only when it is too late. “It has to do with the tradition that they’ve inherited of cooking with all manner of chemicalized foil from forests,” he says. “Every tree has its own chemical content and you are burning such chemical content and you are taking in the smoke of such chemical content into you, into your body, into your lungs. So it will now bring out its real consequences when you are old.”
The consequences are stark—heart disease, lung disease, a slow, creeping suffocation that claims lives prematurely. The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) lays bare the scale of the crisis: 3.8 million people each year die from illnesses attributable to household air pollution. It’s a silent killer, stalking the kitchens of the poor, where solid fuels and kerosene are the norm.
In 2021, a documentary titled “Air Pollution: The Silent Killer” brought this hidden crisis into the light. It showcased the introduction of efficient cook stoves, a small but significant step towards cleaner, safer cooking. Ibrahim, the UNDP-GEF Focal Person interviewed in the documentary, describes the initiative as a necessary shift in thinking. “The intention of sustainable fuel wood is to rechannel the direction of people’s thinking on how firewood or how cooking fuel should look like in Nigeria, especially in northern Nigeria where deforestation is on the high and there’s a need for us to change attitude towards our forest and be able to make a sustainable living.”
Helen, one of the beneficiaries of these efficient cookstoves, speaks with a kind of relief that only those who have known the choking grip of smoke can understand. “What we used in the past cost about 3-4 thousand a month, but now that I started using the energy of efficient cookstove even that of 2000 exceeds a month,” she notes. The savings are a tangible benefit, but the cleaner air is an even greater one.
The road ahead is long, but there are paths forward. Organizations like Climate and Clean Air Coalition, Energypedia, and WHO are advocating for cleaner fuels, raising awareness, and pushing for the widespread adoption of clean cooking practices. The solutions are there—proper ventilation, the introduction of LPG, biogas, or electricity—but the will to implement them must match the urgency of the crisis, experts say.