Smoke and the Morning Ritual

05:30AM, Three Weeks Ago. Tuesday.

The promise of free school meals begins here—in a long, corrugated metal box held together by rough-hewn wood. It feels less like a building and more like a desperate compromise against the elements. By dawn, smoke has already claimed the air, thick and stinging, rising from seven three- stone fires that fuel the city’s vision of feeding its children.

The metal door groans open, and the twenty women who cook for the school step into a wall of heat and a blinding, acrid haze. The air is thick—a particulate soup exceeding 1,000 µg/m³ of PM₂.₅—40 times the World Health Organization’s daily guideline—that catches in the throat and coats the tongue. Many of the women are mothers whose own children will later line up to eat the meals they now prepare. Inside, seven three-stone fires pulse like angry hearts. Five line one wall, two squat on the opposite end, their smoke coiling upward into a corrugated ceiling long since blackened by soot.

This is not a silent ritual. It is a roar of crackling wood and the rasping chorus of wet, rattling coughs. The women move with practiced wariness, eyes red-rimmed, clothes steeped in the ghost of fires past. There are no tables, no storage shelves, only soot-caked pots, damp logs, and the constant shuffle of bodies. Food preparation happens outside—an exile imposed by the smoke that owns the room.

Selam, the lead cook, opens a ruled notebook with soot-blackened hands. “Tea — start 05:38,” she writes, her thumb leaving a dark print on the page. Three 60-liter pots are hauled onto the stones. Their bottoms are insulated in grime, each layer of soot stealing more of the fire’s energy, leaving the flames to rage and waste.

The two-meter logs are the real masters here—heavy, stubborn, and hungry. One end burns while the other juts into the walkway, a tripping hazard and a reminder that the work demands both muscle and vigilance. Amarech, one of the younger cooks, kneels to force a log deeper into the fire, shielding her face from the blast. It will take more than an hour for the water to boil.

06:29: No steam, only smoke and heat. 06:45: A whisper of bubbles.

07:10: One pot rolls 07:25: Another.

07:40: The last.

70 minutes gone, the air unbreathable, their eyes raw. The first kettle pours at 07:50; the last cup at 08:15—one hundred and eighty liters of tea wrestled from wood and exhaustion.

When Selam shuts her notebook, a puff of soot blooms from its cover. She rubs her forehead, leaving a dark streak of fatigue. The kitchen is not a network of cooperation; it is a daily war.

The Arithmetic of Hunger

At first glance, the numbers look generous. The city allocates 32 birr per child per day for two meals. But once taxes and administrative deductions are removed, only 25 birr reaches the women who actually prepare the food. That missing seven birr creates a gulf large enough to swallow the entire program’s intent.

It is a budget built on a fiction. In one school kitchen, where twenty women feed 2,100 children, the simple math of monthly purchases proves it costs 34.7 birr to put breakfast and lunch on the table. And because market prices are never fixed, a computer model that simulates thousands of real-world price scenarios shows the likely cost is even higher—36.7 birr. The city’s 25 birr is not just insufficient; it is a fantasy.

The result is an 11 birr shortfall per child—a third of the meal’s true cost, gone. Even if the full 32 birr made it to the kitchen, it would only cover seven out of every ten meals. The program is not struggling; it is engineered to fail.

The Human Equation

Numbers alone cannot capture what that deficit looks like in practice. In kitchens like this, twenty women work from dawn until late afternoon, preparing food for more than two thousand students. Among those students are their own sons and daughters. From their classrooms, the children cannot see their mothers, but they can see the constant plume of smoke—a grim GPS coordinate marking the place where their labor, and their lungs, are spent to feed them. After all deductions, their average monthly pay is about 2,000 birr—less than the cost of lunch in the city for a week.

This situation produces predictable behavioral outcomes. High turnover is common, as many eventually leave for informal food vending or domestic work that offers slightly better pay or more autonomy. Those who stay are forced to improvise in ways that compromise the program’s objectives. When ingredient prices rise, they may develop coping mechanisms such as reducing portion sizes or stretching meals by adding water or fillers.

Food waste adds another unseen layer to the problem. Because the program requires each child to receive a fixed portion regardless of appetite, enormous amounts of food are discarded. In one school kitchen, 40 kilograms of oats were left uneaten after breakfast and 130 kilograms of injera with sauce after lunch—a waste that, at bulk prices, equals several days of wages for the cooks themselves.

The daily rhythm of cooking, serving, and scraping leftovers reveals in concrete terms the imbalance between what the city allocates and what the work demands. The women have made a system out of shortage, holding the city’s promise together with smoke, muscle, and habit.

The Environmental Debt

Every meal has an energy cost, and in Addis Ababa’s school kitchens, that cost is paid in firewood and smoke. The women feed long, heavy logs into open three-stone fires, burning through entire piles of wood each week to keep multiple 60-liter pots—some even larger— boiling simultaneously.

The system is brutally inefficient: the fires convert barely 15 percent of their energy into usable heat. The rest escapes as wasted fuel and a constant, visible haze that carries a measurable toll— PM₂.₅ levels regularly exceed 1,000 micrograms per cubic meter, forty times the World Health Organization’s safe limit. The cooks breathe this for at least six hours a day, their coughs a constant part of the kitchen’s soundtrack.

This is not just a public health crisis; it is an environmental contradiction. A back-of-the-envelope calculation is revealing: if just one school kitchen burns 30 logs a day, the city’s thousands of kitchens consume the equivalent of a small forest. A city that plants millions of seedlings under its Green Legacy Initiative is, simultaneously, feeding its children by burning down its forests. The very program meant to nurture the future is mortgaging it.

The environmental cost never appears in the program’s ledgers. Instead, it is written in the lungs of the women who keep the pots boiling—mothers slowly burning themselves to keep their children fed.

The Policy Blind Spot

The school feeding program is not collapsing because the city lacks money; it is collapsing because of a fundamental design flaw. The policy failure is precise: for every 32 BIRR the city allocates per child, a mandatory 7 BIRR is deducted before the money ever reaches the kitchen. This single step siphons off the program’s viability, leaving the cooks with an impossible budget and all the responsibility. They are forced to absorb the shocks of market inflation with no authority to adjust, rationing ingredients and diluting meals to make the numbers fit a reality that doesn’t exist.

Correcting this blind spot requires a twin focus: restoring the full budget and spending it more wisely. The most immediate step is to eliminate the seven birr deduction, a move our model shows would raise the program’s feasibility from zero to 70-75 percent. This alone would lift the cooks out of chronic loss.

But to achieve true stability, the city must also attack costs at their source. Our analysis identified that just five items—bread, eggs, injera, shiro, and cooking oil—drive roughly 70 percent of all cost variation. Bread is the single largest expense; eggs, a weekly financial shock; injera and shiro, heavy staples; and oil, a deceptively costly necessity. This concentration of cost is also an opportunity. By implementing centralized bulk purchasing for these specific staples, the city could dramatically reduce expenses, protect against inflation, and standardize quality, making the restored 32 birr stretch to its absolute limit.

Finally, sustainability is not only financial. While the cooks have a formal contract with the education bureau, their status remains that of low-wage laborers, indispensable yet undervalued.

True reform means moving beyond a contract that merely formalizes their poverty. Recognizing them as essential public service providers is not charity; it is sound institutional design. This means renegotiating their terms to include a living wage, providing protective equipment, and giving them a voice in planning. This would reduce turnover, improve food safety, and finally honor the expertise on which the entire program depends.

The policy blind spot is therefore not about insufficient generosity, but misplaced priorities. Fixing it does not require new money—only the political will to ensure every birr allocated for a child’s meal reaches the kitchen, and that every birr spent there counts.

The Unfinished Lesson

Every morning, long before the first bell, the women who sustain Addis Ababa’s school feeding program enter a world of heat and smoke to make the city’s promise real. They are the unseen architecture of public welfare—building daily continuity out of scarcity.

The lesson their work teaches is simple but unlearned: a public program fails not when its budget is too small, but when its design ignores the people who make it work. The gap between allocation and reality is not only financial; it is institutional, environmental, and moral. It is a brutal exchange where mothers consume their own health so that their children may eat today, trading years of breath for a few hours of nourishment.

Most kitchens like these carry the city’s ambitions on their backs—its commitment to child nutrition, gender equity, and clean energy—yet they do so with little more than endurance. Their kitchens, blackened by soot, stand in quiet contradiction to Ethiopia’s own aspirations under the Green Legacy, Clean Ethiopia, and Clean Kitchens initiatives. A system meant to nourish children should not poison those who prepare the food.

Restoring cooks’ access to the full budget, securing fair wages, and modernizing the kitchens with clean energy technologies would convert survival into sustainability. These changes cost less than the waste they would prevent—in food, fuel, and human health.

The unfinished lesson, then, is not about charity but coherence: that development succeeds when policy, budget, and human dignity align. No society should demand such sacrifice from its mothers in the name of public service. Until the women at the stoves can breathe clean air and earn a living wage from the meals they serve, the city’s most important social program will remain exactly what it is today—a promise still waiting to be kept.

Tsegaye Nega is a Professor Emeritus at Carleton College in the United States and the Founder and CEO of Anega Energies Manufacturing.

Contributed by Tsegaye Nega (PhD)