Costa Rica vs Guatemala: Who Stopped Cooking on Fire? 🇨🇷🇬🇹
Costa Rica and Guatemala: share of people cooking with gas or electricity, 1990-2027.
Costa Rica: 79% (1990) → 97% (2024) → 97% (2026, estimate)
Guatemala: 38% (1990) → 51% (2024) → 53% (2026, estimate)
What the number means: 30% = only 30 of every 100 people cook with gas or electricity; 70 still cook on fires of wood, charcoal or dung.
Cooking smoke inside the home is one of the biggest killers in poor countries, mostly of women and small children.
Clean cooking = cooking mainly with electricity, gas (LPG, natural gas, biogas), solar or alcohol fuels. Everyone else cooks mainly with wood, charcoal, dung, crop waste, coal or kerosene, whose smoke fills the home (WHO, SDG 7.1.2).
Data: WHO Global Health Observatory (2026), 2000-2024, via Our World in Data; 1990-1999: earlier WHO estimates (WDI archive 2016), adjusted to today's level. Values after the last official year (shown dashed in the video) are estimates: the trend of the last years continued and damped. Full list of sources and methods: sources_living.txt.
🎵 Music: Ego Chall - Blue Deer Studio
Follow for more data videos!
#costarica #guatemala #cooking #cleanenergy #airpollution #lpg #livingconditions #datavisualization #dataviz #statistics #countrycomparison #2026
