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When temperatures plummet in the Mongolian winter and households pile more coal onto their stoves to keep warm, Oyun-Erdene Navganjav’s concern grows for herself and her family.
“It gets very cold and very smoky. There’s much more pollution and I worry about how much it is damaging the children’s health,” says the 30-year-old mother of three from her three-room brick home in the Bayankhoshuu subcenter on the southern outskirts of the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar.
Oyun-Erdene is one of around 840,000 people who live in one of Mongolia’s so-called
ger districts, unplanned neighborhoods where brick houses or traditional Mongolian tents perch in small family plots allotted by the government. These neighborhoods have expanded rapidly in recent years with migrants from the countryside unable to find or afford high-priced homes in developed parts of the city.