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Paper short abstract

Women’s cooking in the Global South, often framed as “traditional” or “modern,” reflects systemic inequalities. An anthropological lens reveals cooking as a site of care, relational labour, and collective agency, highlighting women’s expertise in shaping just, inclusive energy futures.

Paper long abstract

In dominant energy and development discourses, women’s cooking practices in Global South contexts are frequently framed through a polarising binary of “traditional” versus “modern”, where fuels and cookstoves are moralised as indicators of progress or failure. Yet women’s energy choices are shaped by macro-level political and economic dynamics over which they have little control, reflecting broader gendered and systemic inequalities that structure everyday life. These include policy processes insufficiently attuned to women’s needs, male-dominated financial decision-making, limited access to credit and financial education, and persistent conditions of energy insecurity.

Rather than approaching women’s cooking practices through narratives of lack, constraint, or the often-derogatory label of “traditional,” an anthropological lens reveals everyday cooking as a site of care, relational labour, and collective navigation of structural injustice. Through cooking, women engage in skilled negotiations of affordability, time, gender norms, and social responsibility that sustain collective wellbeing, enacting forms of solidarity that are frequently invisible within dominant development frameworks.

Drawing on action-oriented research from the JustGESI project with women’s cooperatives and community groups in Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, and Tanzania, this paper treats cooking as an ethnographic entry point for examining power, care, and inequality across scales. By learning from what women already do - how they mobilise embodied knowledge, social networks, collective resources - the paper challenges deficit-based and colonial epistemologies that render women’s practices static or backward. Instead, it positions their situated expertise as central to feminist knowledge production, collective agency, and the co-creation of more just and inclusive energy futures.