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Data

Share of population using solid fuels as the main cooking fuel

About this data

Source
Bonjour et al. (2013) – processed by Our World in Data
Last updated
November 1, 2017
Date range
1980–2010
Unit
%

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Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Bonjour et al. – Solid fuel use for household cooking: Country and regional estimates for 1980–2010

95% Confidence Intervals for the years 1990, 2000, and 2010 are given in the Supplemental Material, Table S3. To give one example: The world's households primarily relying on solid fuels for cooking declined from 62% to 41% between 1980 and 2010. The 95% confidence interval for 1980 is from 58% to 66% and for 2010 from 37% to 44%.

Countries are grouped by WHO region and income category (WHO 2012e; see Supplemental Material, Table S2).

Retrieved on
January 11, 2017
Retrieved from
https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/1205987/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Bonjour et al. (2013). Solid Fuel Use for Household Cooking: Country and Regional Estimates for 1980–2010. Environmental Health Perspectives.

95% Confidence Intervals for the years 1990, 2000, and 2010 are given in the Supplemental Material, Table S3. To give one example: The world's households primarily relying on solid fuels for cooking declined from 62% to 41% between 1980 and 2010. The 95% confidence interval for 1980 is from 58% to 66% and for 2010 from 37% to 44%.

Countries are grouped by WHO region and income category (WHO 2012e; see Supplemental Material, Table S2).

Retrieved on
January 11, 2017
Retrieved from
https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/1205987/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Bonjour et al. (2013). Solid Fuel Use for Household Cooking: Country and Regional Estimates for 1980–2010. Environmental Health Perspectives.

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Share of population using solid fuels as the main cooking fuel”. Our World in Data (2026). Data adapted from Bonjour et al.. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260511-092124/grapher/population-using-solid-fuels-for-cooking.html [online resource] (archived on May 11, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Bonjour et al. (2013) – processed by Our World in Data

Full citation

Bonjour et al. (2013) – processed by Our World in Data. “Share of population using solid fuels as the main cooking fuel” [dataset]. Bonjour et al., “Solid fuel use for household cooking: Country and regional estimates for 1980–2010” [original data]. Retrieved May 12, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260511-092124/grapher/population-using-solid-fuels-for-cooking.html (archived on May 11, 2026).

Download

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Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.

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Data API

Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.

Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-using-solid-fuels-for-cooking.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-using-solid-fuels-for-cooking.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-using-solid-fuels-for-cooking.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-using-solid-fuels-for-cooking.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-using-solid-fuels-for-cooking.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-using-solid-fuels-for-cooking.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-using-solid-fuels-for-cooking.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-using-solid-fuels-for-cooking.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear