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Impact Area Research

HEALTH

In order to address the 4 million premature deaths caused by household air pollution each year, the Alliance is working closely with our partners to create effective strategies to scale up the dissemination of cleaner burning fuels and efficient stoves for household cooking.  The Alliance is working to build the evidence base that switching from inefficient and polluting cooking fuels and technologies to cleaner ones will reduce respiratory diseases and other health impacts.

  • Child survival:  In order to quantify the health effects of household air pollution, the Alliance has supported studies on cooking and child survival in Ghana, Nepal, and Nigeria since mid-2012. These studies have been undertaken to understand impacts on birth outcomes, including low birth weight, pre-term birth, and birth defects, as well as the incidence of severe respiratory illness, including pneumonia and other acute lower respiratory infections (ALRI) in children under five years of age. Results from these studies are expected summer 2015.
  • Non communicable diseases (NCDs): Beyond children’s health, household air pollution (HAP) is also a leading risk factor for non-communicable diseases, particularly among non-smoking women in developing countries. Few studies have focused on measuring the potential impacts of reduction in HAP exposure on indicators for NCDs. In 2015, the Alliance plans to fund up to three studies evaluating the impacts of reduced HAP on the incidence of non-communicable diseases.
  • Burns:  The Alliance is working with WHO, CDC, and a global network of burn surgeons to develop an international burns registry to estimate the proportion of severe burns due that is due to cooking.  The Alliance is also funding a pilot project to test the feasibility of using resource-appropriate barriers around cookstoves to prevent burn injuries in Kenya. In 2015, the Alliance plans to fund up to three additional studies to evaluate techniques to reduce cookstove-related burns.

ENVIRONMENT

In order to help reduce environmental degradation and mitigate climate change, the Alliance is committed to supporting the quantification of the benefits of clean cookstoves through various studies.

  • Household to Ambient Air Pollution: According to a recent study, household air pollution accounts for 12% of ambient air pollution globally; however, this number varies regionally. The Alliance is working to determine the amount of household air pollution contributing to ambient air pollution in India and China. Results from these studies are expected in December 2015.
  • Climate Benefits of Cookstoves: The Alliance will also be supporting efforts to better determine black carbon emissions from a range of cookstoves and fuels in key geographic regions. These efforts will help us better quantify the climate benefits of improved cookstoves.
  • Cookstoves and REDD+: Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) is an effort to create a financial value for the carbon stored in forests, offering incentives for developing countries to reduce emissions from forested lands and invest in low-carbon paths to sustainable development. The Alliance will be supporting activities to align REDD+ activities with improved cookstove projects.

HUMANITARIAN

Refugees, internally displaced people, and other crisis-affected populations disproportionately lack access to clean cookstoves and fuels for cooking. Clean and efficient cooking solutions can help women and children reduce the need for long and often dangerous trips in search of fuel, and can improve outcomes for health, protection, food security, environment, and livelihoods in humanitarian settings. Yet all too often humanitarian cookstove and fuel programs end after the pilot stage due to a lack of rigorous data collection, monitoring, and evaluation of impact.

The Alliance is working with its humanitarian partners to build a solid base of evidence on the impacts of clean cookstove and fuel programs among crisis-affected populations. Through a series of trainings for UN and NGO field staff, the Alliance is improving the technical monitoring and evaluation skills of humanitarian workers and encouraging the integration of monitoring and evaluation (M&E) into all stages of safe fuel and energy programming to enable rigorous data collection. Better evidence through M&E will enable better decisions regarding the types of technologies and fuels that can have the greatest impact.

The Alliance has also identified specific knowledge gaps related to the use of cookstoves and fuels in humanitarian settings. For example, in many refugee camps incidents of gender-based violence (GBV) occur when women leave the camps to collect firewood for cooking. The Alliance is spearheading research into the protection risks around firewood collection, and the quantitative impacts cookstove and fuel programs may have on the lives of displaced women and girls.
Lastly, the Alliance has developed a major online platform on which humanitarian implementers can share research and information to better inform their programs. The Safe Fuel and Energy resource library has more than 88 tools, reports, and evaluations that can enable humanitarian implementers to make informed programming decisions.

GENDER

One of the core pillars of the Alliance’s gender strategy is to build evidence, share data, and evaluate gender and women’s empowerment impacts and approaches in the clean cooking sector. The Alliance has commissioned research to understand the gender impacts of cookstove and fuel adoption, as well as the role women play in scaling adoption. The Alliance is funding studies to analyze the impacts of women’s engagement in the cookstove value chain, looking at factors such as fuel savings, reduction in drudgery, time savings, and health improvements. You can find more information about this group in the latest issue of Boiling Point.

The Alliance has funded three studies looking at the gender and empowerment impacts in the clean cooking sector, as well as the impact women have on adoption. The final findings for all of these studies will be available online in the coming months.

  • A regional study in India, Nepal and Bangladesh, conducted by Practical Action, which examined gender impacts of adoption. Key findings include: households with clean cookstoves are more likely to send their children to school than those using traditional cookstoves, and women who are members of social groups have higher adoption rates. An overview of the study can be found here.
  • An applied research study in Kenya conducted by Johns Hopkins University and ESVAK tested the impact of innovative empowerment and leadership training on improved cookstove entrepreneurs. In Kenya, JHU found that entrepreneurs who participated in empowerment training were almost three times more likely to be active sellers, and being female or living in an urban area more than doubled the likelihood of being an active sellers. An overview of the study can be found here.
  • A study in the Andean region explored the cultural implications of clean cookstove adoption related to cooking and non-cooking behavior, such as household interactions, higher status in the communities, more freedom of choice for extra activities, and changes in decision making. Results show that time savings for women entrepreneurs who received training led to increased engagement in income-generating activities, as well as reported health benefits such as decreased smoke exposure and frequency of burns from cooking. An overview of the study can be found here.

In Phase 2, the Alliance will focus on these key research areas for gender and social impact:

  • Commission research on most effective approaches for scaling women’s empowerment
  • Research and evaluation to understand gender and socio-economic impacts of a variety of business models
  • Develop M&E methodologies and tools to measure socio-economic impacts
  • Quantify benefits for businesses who increase women’s engagement and implement gender strategies
  • Quantify benefits of increasing women’s engagement on sustained adoption of clean cooking technologies
  • Special focus: understanding gender and livelihood impacts and drivers in humanitarian settings