4. Firewood
Firewood is more than fuel. It is an essential part of cooking cultures – linked to the taste and smell of everything from rice to tea. Demand for firewood is also a vital part of refugee economies, constantly defining and shaping exchanges between displaced and host communities. In Kakuma and Goudoubo refugee camps people find themselves in a changing energy landscape where traditional fuels are recognized by humanitarian actors and refugees alike as ‘dirty’, yet where firewood also remains a crucial fuel source to meet daily cooking, lighting and heating needs.
Everyday relationships with firewood are not equally shared. Women and girls encounter firewood most frequently, and bear the greatest responsibility for its collection, transportation and use. This takes them outside their domestic worlds and into new exchange networks with other displaced people and host communities. Women’s physical labour is a vital part of the energy landscape in Goudoubo and Kakuma, keeping daily life ticking along and connecting people in complex exchange networks. Gender is inextricable from the shaping of everyday energy experiences in both camps. Tasks related to firewood and charcoal are typically gendered activities, with the collection, transportation and usage of firewood nearly exclusively relegated to girls and women within the camp. These tasks are often time-intensive; the collection of firewood, for example, often requires the crossing of great distances inside and outside of the camp. Women also drive the food-fuel exchange networks in Kakuma and Goudoubo, host community meetings to buy, sell or trade food rations for firewood.
In other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the gendering of tasks around firewood is often normalized by displaced communities and humanitarian practitioners. It is often referred to as an inevitable, even common-sense facet of everyday life.22 Yet women’s experiences cannot be homogenized. Multiple variables, including ethnicity, age and status, shape their energy encounters. Those with higher levels of wealth can minimize time spent in the management of fuels by paying for other camp inhabitants or members of the host community to transport food and fuels from the distribution centre to their household, and this time can be spent doing other tasks, such as engaging in income-generating activities.
This chapter explores the nature of this work, focusing on barter as a non-market economic transaction. Despite attempts to introduce new technologies, firewood remains an important part of people’s lives. In contexts defined by poverty, precariousness and vulnerability, what does it mean to brand these things as dirty and primitive?
Bartering food for fuel
The processes surrounding firewood in Kakuma and Goudoubo are marked by symbolic contrasts between refugees, the host community and the state. In Kakuma, the Turkana people who form the host population harvest and deliver wood, while aid workers and the police monitor (some of) the transactions, and the female inhabitants of the camp carry the wood home and are responsible for using it to cook and later for scrubbing their pots of its residue. In Goudoubo, additional firewood is sought outside of the camp boundaries on land that is inhabited by the local Burkinabe host community, and women and girls manage the collection, transportation and utilization of firewood.
The organization of refugee camps as defined by top-down policy and practice is not always reflected on the ground, where refugees structure their own interactions in ways that are shaped by political, social and cultural hierarchies. Despite not being legally permitted to work, for example, the inhabitants of Kakuma and Goudoubo engage in far-reaching and complex informal networks that reconfigure systems of exclusion.
Neither Kakuma nor Goudoubo are connected to centralized electricity grids (although businesses in a subsection of Kakuma were able to connect to a regional grid in 2018). But, rather than see these spaces as defined by the absence of electricity grids, each camp can be viewed as defined by other kinds of grid. These include the humanitarian grid that is organized in top-down systems of control, including systems for the registration and identification of inhabitants as well as restrictions on freedom of movement and employment. Another might be the grid of informal economic interactions that underpin much of everyday life. This grid is defined by the cash and barter transactions that take place between camp inhabitants, as well as between them and members of the host communities, connecting people together in a lattice of exchange relationships.
The attention of some in the humanitarian energy community has recently focused on the possibility of cash transactions within the camps, but many transactions are not cash-based and instead involve barter.
The attention of some in the humanitarian energy community has recently focused on the possibility of cash transactions within the camps, but many transactions are not cash-based and instead involve barter. The exchange of food for fuel is a classic example of barter and, in both camps, is undertaken predominantly by women who must make the unenviable decisions about how to balance scarce household finances in order to best feed their families.
Refugees in Kakuma camp are provided with a firewood collection card that they use every two months to collect wood from a designated distribution centre. Firewood is sourced from members of the Turkana host community, who are licensed to provide firewood. These donations, however, are often inadequate for heating and cooking needs, particularly for smaller families who receive less firewood, as the quantities are determined by the number of people in a family unit. There are numerous complaints concerning the challenge of firewood supply; one exasperated South Sudanese refugee said, ‘we always run out of firewood… This is impossible.’
In 2016, the free distribution of firewood in Goudoubo was partially replaced by the distribution of liquid petroleum gas rations (see Chapter 9). Humanitarian agencies and refugees were keenly aware that the firewood hand-outs of 10 kilogrammes of wood per refugee per month were inadequate for meeting energy needs. In a sign of the increasing scarcity of wood in the region, at one point supplies were being collected more than 100 kilometres away from the camp.23
As explored in Chapter 9, although the use of gas does not add to tensions regarding local resources like wood, does not produce smoke or soot like wood fuels, and can reduce cooking time, it does not totally address the challenge of sufficiently meeting household energy needs. There are relatively few examples of functional gas distribution networks serving humanitarian settings, and in Goudoubo’s case gas is not always available.24 This means that many women and girls make simultaneous use of multiple energy technologies and fuels, sourcing firewood elsewhere, either through trade networks or from foraging beyond the camp boundaries.
With employment illegal for refugees in Burkina Faso and Kenya, money is in short supply and refugees use food rations to barter for more firewood and charcoal with host communities. In Kakuma, a South Sudanese inhabitant said that she frequently trades three bowls of sorghum for one basin of charcoal. ‘It’s a good deal’, she said. Recent research has shown the high prevalence of a trade in food for fuel within both camps, with one-fifth of refugees surveyed in Goudoubo in 2017 exchanging their food rations for additional fuel among themselves and with members of the host community.25
With employment illegal for refugees in Burkina Faso and Kenya, money is in short supply and refugees use food rations to barter for more firewood and charcoal with host communities.
These exchanges between refugees and host-community members happen in public spaces, in domestic spaces, in markets and in places of work and trade. Though they might be described as taking place within the informal economy, these interactions are not without rules and expectations. People often seek out or choose the same exchange partners on a regular basis. Sometimes, establishing the exchange value of commodities demands a process of serious negotiation. This is a demonstration of the market at work in its oldest form.
The language barriers that often exist between refugees and host-community members do not prevent social and economic interactions; sometimes these transactions can occur without words. In one such interchange researchers witnessed between a female refugee, her husband, and a Turkana woman in Kakuma, the refugee couple laid down a plate of rice outside their shelter and the Turkana woman responded by laying down two bundles of firewood beside the plate. The refugee woman chose the larger bundle of the two, and the Turkana woman claimed the plate of rice. Not a word was spoken, yet there was a successful trade interaction despite significant cultural and linguistic differences.
Scarcity and disruption
Firewood is not without its tensions, however. In Kakuma, cash payments to the Turkana people for the harvesting and sale of firewood has emerged as a primary source of income for this local community. The inadequacy of firewood provision by the humanitarian administration for daily energy needs drives many refugees to cross the camp perimeter in search of more of this precious fuel. Given their legal status and the boundaries etched out in sheet metal gates and invisible lines between the camp and Turkana county, this movement also creates tensions with the host community. This can be a risky endeavour for those that make the journey. Instances of gender-based violence towards refugee women and girls who leave the confines of Kakuma in search of firewood occur in confrontations with Turkana community members.26
As one Somali woman said, ‘I have no option. I need the food, and I need the wood. I do not have the money to buy anything additional. We move in groups when we leave the camp, we will be attacked otherwise.’ Stories like these demonstrate the lengths that some refugee women go through to provide their family with fuel for cooking and heating, as well as illustrating a vulnerability of women and girls that is enhanced by their refugee status and driven by their energy needs in the absence of adequate humanitarian provision.
In Goudoubo, too, scarcity of wood threatens to disrupt the relatively peaceful relationship that has existed between refugees and host communities so far.27 Currently, however, among host-community members this concern appears to be outweighed by the belief that the refugees’ presence contributes to a mutually beneficial relationship. One man in a nearby village said, ‘I am very happy with the arrival of the refugees. It contributed to developing the village. When the refugees arrived everything changed. Water is now available and we have a market with lots of vendors and activity.’
According to Sustainable Energy for All, the international organization mandated with fostering sustainable affordable energy access, some 4 billion people remain dependent on solid fuels even after decades of experience in the technologies and fuels that could improve their living standards and health outcomes.28 The stories and relationships formed around firewood suggest that difficulties in changing practice may have specific dynamics in displacement situations. These include the fact that ‘traditional cooking fuels’ have a cultural and social significance that can be particularly strong in times of crisis and the possibly mutually beneficial relationships that the informal markets for wood create between refugee and host community.
‘Clean’ vs ‘dirty’ cookstoves
New cooking fuels are often touted as ‘clean’ by humanitarian organizations within the camps, in contrast to traditional cooking practices. But what exactly is cleanliness, and how do understandings and experiences of it and energy vary across diverse demographics within a refugee camp, shaped by social structures of religion, ethnicity and gender?
The low adoption rate of ‘cleaner’ technology in refugee camps cannot be explained only in reference to people’s limited resources or generic user preferences; they also need to be understood with reference to specific forms of local knowledge.29 Varying levels of interest in solar cookers in Goudoubo, for example, reflect specific forms of practical wisdom about material technologies and specific ideas about food and shame. People’s preferences are linked to their understanding of the reparability of devices and of storage challenges as well as to the way new technologies make food taste.
Against this backdrop, attempts to characterize old or established technologies as dirty is problematic. ‘Dirt’ and residues have a power, driving people to action. Across Goudoubo and Kakuma, cleanliness within the household is a task largely relegated to women, with the spotlessness of one’s cooking pots, hands, and clothing a measure by which one is judged socially. The energy landscape in both camps is ever evolving, and the humanitarian push for ‘cleaner’ cookstoves contributes to shifting standards in cleanliness, yet access to this technology remains uneven.
In places, like Goudoubo and Kakuma, where people articulate a consistent desire for cheaper and less residue-producing cooking technologies, there remains a heavy reliance on firewood and charcoal for everyday energy needs as disparities in access to alternative fuels and cooking technologies persist. Labelling technologies as ‘dirty’ or ‘clean’ perpetuates an existing narrative of shame and does not help those who want to switch heating, cooking and lighting methods yet lack the resources to do so. If humanitarian energy programmes and policies are to be appropriate and sensitive to context, they need to develop a greater understanding of the diverse economic, social and cultural factors that slow or prevent the uptake of cleaner energy services.
22 Mulumba, D. (2011), ‘The Gendered Politics of Firewood in Kiryandongo Refugee Settlement in Uganda’, African Geographical Review, 30(1), pp. 33–46.
23 Corbyn and Vianello (2018), Prices, Products, Priorities, p. 20.
24 Although it is worth noting the schemes that have been undertaken in Niger (http://www.unhcr.org/uk/niger-access-to-gas-project.html), Tanzania (https://reliefweb.int/report/united-republic-tanzania/gas-initiative-protecting-refugees-and-improving-lives) and Bangladesh (https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/environment-2018-5-9_twopage_eetwg_summary9.pdf) among others.
25 Corbyn and Vianello (2018), Prices, Products, Priorities, p. 20. Unfortunately this is also common in many other humanitarian settings. In Ethiopia’s Dollo Ado camps, for example, Haskamp and Haas found that 28 per cent of households had sold food rations to buy cooking fuel in the week prior to being surveyed. Haskamp, S. and Haas, O. J. (2015), ‘Baseline Survey Ethiopia Dollo Ado’, Integration Environment and Energy for UNHCR, 28 April.
26 Dobrowolsky, A., et al. (2013), Women, Migration and Citizenship: Making Local, National and Transnational Connections, Ashgate.
27 Corbyn and Vianello (2018), Prices, Products, Priorities, p. 20.
28 World Bank/ESMAP (2018), ‘Tracking SDG7: The Energy Progress Report 2018’, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank, https://trackingsdg7.esmap.org/data/files/download-documents/tracking_sdg7-the_energy_progress_report_full_report.pdf (accessed 21 Aug. 2019).
29 Low adoption rates for new technologies are seen in both camps. For example, despite a range of interventions, ‘Ninety-nine per cent of households in Goudoubo and 86 per cent of those in Kakuma I rank as Tier 0 or Tier 1 (out of six tiers) for cooking and lighting access on the Sustainable Energy for All (SE4All) index’, Corbyn and Vianello (2018), Prices, Products, Priorities, p. 5.