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The name Awasuka comes from the words aawas sudhar karyakram, which mean “habitat improvement programme”. With this mission, that of improving the living conditions of rural communities in remote areas of Nepal, especially women and children, the project of the same name has been developed and in which researchers from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia – Barcelona collaborate. Tech (UPC).
Through the project, which brings together university, municipal, business, and NGO cooperation and which has the support of the Center for Development Cooperation (CCD) of the UPC, fireplace stoves have been installed in rural communities in remote areas of Nepal. optimized to avoid contamination inside homes. Now, UPC researchers are evaluating the effects and how the improvement in air quality has had an impact on the health of children and women.
Awasuka's origins date back to the 2015 Nepal earthquake, when it began working on developing and disseminating technology for repairing damaged houses and building new low-cost homes with earthquake-resistant technology. Subsequently, the program directed by architect Mònica Sans (UPC alumnus) has focused on the installation of hundreds of optimized chimney stoves, offering a solution to avoid contamination inside rural houses, which cook and They heat with a wood fire without conditions. While the earthquake killed 9,000 people in 2015, toxic gases from kitchens prematurely kill 24,000 people each year, especially women and children, according to WHO data from 2019.
Now, we want to evaluate the effects of installing these fireplace stoves on improving air quality on the health of children and women. The objective: to encourage the use of these fireplace stoves, both in rural communities in Nepal and among political and health authorities. Researchers Jordi Fonollosa, from the Bioinformatics amd Biomedical Signals Laboratory group, Clara Prats and Daniel López Codina, from the Computational Biology and Complex Systems group (BIOCOM-SC) participated in this research work.
“Quality cooperation projects generate changes that go far beyond the project itself. The university provides essential knowledge to carry out quality projects,” explains professor Daniel López Codina. “The technology proposed by Awasaka is simple and effective, our objective is now to quantitatively demonstrate the benefits it implies. It was an essential step to ensure that many more families in Nepal can live without smoke in their lungs. “It is an especially important project for the health of young children and women.”
The pediatrician Ferran Campillo, from the Environmental Health Unit of the Olot Hospital, the epidemiologist David Ferràndiz, from the Catalan Health Service also collaborates in the initiative; the Brazilian researcher Jones Alburquerque from Recife, from the Keizo Asami Laboratory of Immunophatology, the engineer in biological systems, Mario Bravo from the BIOCOM-SC group and two students from the UPC.
