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Indoor air pollution, due to household solid fuel use, is responsible for a significant burden of disease in developing countries. Fuel choice is often associated with household income. However, many other socio-economic and environmental factors also influence the choice of fuel and the resultant indoor air pollution exposure. The aim of this paper is to assess the role of poverty on indoor air pollution in Pakistan through fuel choice. Furthermore, a multinomial logit model has been used to predict the determinants of fuel choice. The results indicate that although poverty makes a significant contribution, other factors such as household location and area, household size, low level of human capital, asset ownership structure and access to basic utilities are the important correlates of fuel choice. Knowledge relating to the proximate determinants for fuel choice is crucial to inform policy and can play a pivotal role in designing sustainable intervention strategies to reduce the risk of exposure to indoor air pollution in Pakistan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In rural and low-income urban households, energy is 'women's business': women are responsible for providing energy, and use it for domestic chores and productive activities. However, the poor quality fuels many women use contribute to their time poverty, ill health, and level of drudgery. Despite these negative impacts, energy policy remains gender-blind. This can be attributed to the invisibility of women's needs to energy planners, stemming from a lack of appropriate gender-analysis tools to meet the particular data requirements of the energy sector. This article analyses why standard gender tools do not provide appropriate gender-disaggregated energy data, and describes a set of tools that have been developed for that purpose. The paper concludes with an evaluation of recent experiences testing the tools in Pakistan, India, and Nepal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, taken from a presentation given to the Women In Development Europe (WIDE) Conference 2005, I consider the situation in Pakistan, within the general context of South Asia as a whole, and focus on the questions that confront feminists today. These questions, I believe, may be relevant to women activists not only in the South but also elsewhere. I discuss the activities of feminists who are engaging in advocacy for gender equality in Pakistan. This is an uphill task, but it has nevertheless resulted in some achievements. Not least of these is Pakistani women’s success in bringing women’s rights to the attention of both policy makers and the general public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]