Through the millennia wood stoves for cooking have been notoriously inefficient. They are unhealthy, and cook slowly. The smoke causes glaucoma, lung diseases, and many other diseases for the women and children.

In the last few decades, many improved wood stoves have been developed (the Chula, the Hiko, the Maendeleo, the Kuni Mbili, the Wendelbro, etc. These new wood stoves are often more difficult to manufacture and they do not offer good control of cooking rate and have poor combustion efficiency which is the main cause of indoor, outdoor pollution. They are often not accepted by the cooks as it does not fit their life style. They consume more fuel than needed, plus they have poor heat transfer to the cooking pan. A somewhat less polluting solution exists in the form of charcoal, which is used by some rural populations for cooking. Doing so only externalizes the various issues, as production of charcoal consumes a great deal of the biomass energy and is more polluting than wood burning.

Electricity, gas or liquid fuels are generally preferred solutions for cooking. However, these fuels are generally not available in rural areas, or are too expensive for rural populations of developing countries. For this reason, a large portion of developing world cooking is still done with fuel wood or gathered biomass from farms.

Almost every country in Asia and Africa has attempted to improve stoves in use. Several initiatives were attempted to implement this. None of them provided a general solution which matched the needs of a large section of society. The improved stoves did save fuel, operating at a thermal efficiency of 22- 30%. However, the improved stoves did little to decrease smoke production, so still remained health hazards to users. Smoke production tended to be quite high prior to the fire reaching operational temperature. None of them use gasification principles in their design. Most of them supply combustion air from a bottom opening. The air flow system within the stoves is not controlled tightly enough to supply the correct amount of air for maximum combustion efficiency.