Radha’s Message for January 2014
Dear friends,
A very happy new year to you all! The Alliance team is off to a running start with work to enable markets and support our partners worldwide. Our efforts in 2014 are being guided by our strategic plan and the results from our recent partner survey. We were pleased to see that our partners indicated that they were very satisfied with the Alliance's contribution to raising the profile of clean cooking solutions and fostering the creation of standards for clean cookstoves and fuels. Our partners have requested that in 2014 we prioritize resource and investment mobilization, continued support in market development, and our role as a knowledge hub for the sector. This important partner feedback, combined with our 2012 results that show that the sector distributed approximately 9 million clean cookstoves worldwide, demonstrates that we are well on our way toward fulfilling our mission and achieving our goal as we begin the transition from Phase I of our business plan to Phase II.
The Alliance has seen high rates of return in meeting its Phase I strategic objectives for the design, launch, and growth of in-country efforts to scale clean cooking solutions. This has been complemented with our efforts to foster an enabling environment through the development of the ISO standards process, the enhancement of testing centers around the world, and the building of a strong evidence base through strategic research. As we prepare for Phase II, our focus will increasingly center on driving user acceptance, innovation, investment, and supply-side operations to scale.
Starting in 2014, and for the next few years, you will see the Alliance build upon its early momentum and success to ensure that we reach our 100 million by '20 goal by designing transformational global, national, and community public awareness campaigns that underscore the multifaceted problem, promote behavior change, and spur adoption of clean cookstoves and fuels. We will continue to support robust and steady infusion of capital to support innovation, production, distribution, and consumer financing mechanisms that enable greater purchase and adoption of clean cooking solutions by those who need them most. In addition we will ramp up resource mobilization efforts to achieve an exponential increase in multilateral, bilateral, and philanthropic resources to support large-scale research efforts, labeling and certification of cookstoves, and enterprise/NGO capacity building to create a thriving marketplace capable of reaching, engaging and servicing the last mile.
There is much to be done this year and all of us at the Alliance team look forward to working closely with you to continue to catalyze cookstove markets around the world.
Regards,
Radha