Household exposure to the risk of cooking smoke: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa

In Sub-Saharan Africa, the place of cooking and choice of fuel for cooking have detrimental effects on health due to excessive exposure to smoke. This study explores household-level exposure to the risk of cooking smoke and its associated determinants. Using a quantitative approach, we pooled the most recent waves of the Demographic Health Survey dataset yielding 442,339 households from 33 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. In this study, we first construct disaggregated measures of smoke exposure risk, determine the extent of households’ vulnerability to this risk, and investigate the associated determinants. We used the ordered probit regression to examine the socio-demographic and economic determinants of the levels of household smoke exposure risk in SSA. We found evidence that 67% of households cook indoors while 86% use smoke-producing fuels for cooking which, may indicate a high level of vulnerability to smoke exposure. As expected, 53% of households have a high risk of smoke exposure. Our findings reveal factors such as wealth, size, educational level, and age of household heads as the key determinants of the disaggregated smoke exposure risk measures. For robustness, we grouped households by their rural-urban locations to establish evidence of the determinants. The study identifies socio-economic characteristics as essential variables in determining a household's level of exposure to cooking smoke risk in SSA. We, therefore, propose to policymakers in the sub-region to improve the accessibility to clean cooking fuels, especially to all rural households. In this light, we recommend the promotion, subsidization, and enforcement of policies to encourage households to use clean cooking fuels.