When I moved to a new town this year, cooking cost me ninety dollars before I boiled any water.
Not ninety dollars a month. Ninety dollars in an afternoon — a cylinder, the gas inside it, and the stove, because they are sold together. And that was the smaller cylinder on offer.
For a household that earns daily, ninety dollars is not a purchase decision. It is a door that does not open.
That number is the most important figure in Somalia’s clean cooking story, and I have never seen it in a programme document.
The transition is not waiting for us
Charcoal was the queen of Somali kitchens for as long as anyone can remember. In the last few years she has been losing, and losing badly, to gas. Any family earning a steady income now cooks with LPG. No donor did this. Households switched because gas takes the smoke out of the kitchen and the hours out of the day. They did not buy a carbon reduction. They bought relief.
Meanwhile, the largest clean cooking programmes in the country are still distributing better charcoal stoves.
We are subsidising the fuel the market is abandoning.
The barrier is the size of the unit
We sell gas in a quantity that demands a lump sum twice over: once to enter, and again at every refill. A household with a salary manages that. A household that earns by the day cannot — not the ninety dollars to begin, and not thirty dollars in one payment at the end of the month either.
So the question is not how to make gas cheaper. It is how to sell it in a size a poor household can actually buy.
We know this in Somalia. In Garowe, where I grew up, we dumped our rubbish in the stream. Today a company collects from the house twice a week, provides the container, and charges five dollars a month. Nobody needed persuading. Somebody simply put capital behind a service people were already willing to pay a little for.
Indonesia proved this at a scale that should end the argument
In 2007 Indonesia set out to move households off kerosene onto gas. The instrument was not a stove programme. It was a starter kit: a 3kg cylinder, a burner, a hose, a regulator, and the first fill — given free.
Between 2007 and 2012 the programme reached over 50 million households, roughly two-thirds of the country. By 2015 more than 57 million kits had been distributed.
Two details matter for us.
The cylinder was three kilos — deliberately small, so that low-income households could both enter and keep buying. My ninety dollars is an artefact of the size we sell, not the cost of gas.
And the household-level persuasion was run by the Ministry of Women’s Empowerment. Women’s organisations did the convincing, because women do the cooking.
What Indonesia also learned, and we should not repeat
Their kerosene subsidy was replaced by an LPG subsidy that grew every year until it became the same fiscal burden they had been trying to escape.
So: subsidise the entry, never the fuel. One kit, once. Households pay their own running costs willingly — they already do.
And do not promise that charcoal will vanish. It did not vanish in Indonesia; households kept a second fuel for the slow pot. Expect displacement, not elimination, and say so before an evaluator says it for you.
What we are asking for
In Somali towns, stop investing in cleaner ways to burn charcoal. Bring in the small cylinder. Put the money into a low-cost starter kit — sold on credit, on instalments, or subsidised once — and into the distributors who can reach a household with three kilos at a time, as often as she can pay for it.
For displaced families and remote villages, none of this applies, and we should say so honestly. Their constraint is not the price of a stove. It is income. Gathering firewood is a rational answer to poverty, and the intervention there is a wage.
But in the towns, the market has already chosen. It is waiting for a cylinder it can afford to pick up.
Sources for the Indonesian figures: Thoday et al., The Mega Conversion Program from kerosene to LPG in Indonesia, Energy for Sustainable Development (2018); Pertamina and Indonesian Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources programme records; World LPG Association, Kerosene to LP Gas Conversion Programme in Indonesia.