Correlates of Ghanaian households’ use of climate-friendly and health-promoting fuels: insight from the 2014 demographic and health surveys

Abstract Background About five of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) directly calls for clean and climate-friendly household cooking fuels to help mitigate Carbon Dioxide (CO 2 ) and black carbon emissions to ensure that the global mean temperature is kept below 1.5 o C to promote good human health. In developing countries, climate-friendly and health-promoting fuels (CF&HPFs) are generally unaffordable and inaccessible. Studies on the prevalence and the predictors of household use of climate-friendly fuels and health-promoting fuels (CF&HPFs) in Ghana are few and nationally non-representative. To effectively design programs that encourage Ghanaian households to use CF&HPFs, the study estimated the proportion of households currently using CF&HPFs and delineated factors that account for their use.Methods The study used the data of the cross-sectional demographic and health surveys conducted in 2014. Chi-square test of independence was used to identify the predictors that were statistically significant related to households’ use of CF&HPFs for the multivariable model. In the multivariable model, we reported prevalence ratios using the generalized linear model (glm), setting the family to “Poisson” and the link to “log.” The estimation adjusted for the study designed and the household sampling weights.Results The main finding was that rich households were 8.85 times likely to use CF&HPFs compared to poor households. We further found that the following factors were associated with a higher probability of a Ghanaian household to use climate-friendly and health-promoting fuels for cooking: male-headed households, households’ headed by persons between 24years and 55 years, households with heads that were currently married or never married, households with heads that have attained at least a primary level education, households with less than eight members, households with at least two women, and households in Western, Central, Greater Accra, Volta, Eastern, Ashanti, Brong Ahafo, Upper East region.Conclusion Given that the most important correlate of household’s use of CF&HPFs is household wealth, we recommend that significant attention should be given to economic empowerment of citizens in policies and interventions aimed at encouraging Ghanaians to use this type of fuel.