International Women’s Day
As this year’s International Women’s Day approaches, we are thinking of the staggering 4 million people, mostly women and children, around the world who die annually from exposure to smoke from inefficient and dirty cooking practices. If we are to address this issue once and for all, women have to be at the center of the solutions that encourage adoption of cleaner stoves and fuels. Women have a crucial role to play in reaching adoption at scale – from developing designs that are user-friendly and user-appropriate to wide-scale marketing and sustained adoption of clean cookstoves and fuels. The Alliance’s over 600 partners recognize that these markets cannot be effectively developed without the full participation and input of the women around the world who have the firsthand experience of the effects of this crucial global problem and a true understanding of what is required to develop appropriate and sustainable solutions.
The Alliance is promoting an increased focus on gender and women’s empowerment in the cookstove and fuel value chains in order to increase the effectiveness and scale of the sector by providing access to cleaner, more efficient cooking technologies, while at the same time empowering women economically by increasing access to business opportunities. In order to raise awareness about this critical health, gender and environmental issue and the multiple effective solutions available, the Alliance is hosting several events and making exciting announcements around our gender and women’s empowerment work in the coming months.
We are excited to announce the two awardees of the recent global call for research on gender and livelihood impacts and opportunities through clean cooking solutions.
- Practical Action Consulting, together with TIDE, Jagriti, and ENERGIA, are leading a year-long research project to study the impact of clean cookstoves on both gender and livelihoods in South Asia. Research in India, Bangladesh and Nepal will build the evidence on impacts of clean cookstoves on women users and their families with respect to overall quality of life, livelihood enhancement, and gender equity, as well as the impacts of women entrepreneurs’ involvement in cookstove value chains.
- The Center for Global Clean Air at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in partnership with Envirofit International and ESVAK Kenya, will systematically assess the impacts of women’s engagement in the improved cookstove value chain in Kenya, test an innovative behavioral empowerment training strategy for cookstove entrepreneurs, and examine the benefits and challenges of improved cookstove use for women consumers and their families.
We are also delighted to announce our new partnership with CARE. Our innovative collaboration demonstrates the future of international development by promoting sustainable solutions with a triple bottom line – particularly as we move from the MDGs to the SDGs post-2015. By leveraging CARE’s programmatic expertise on poverty eradication and women’s empowerment and utilizing the Global Alliance’s expertise in the clean cooking sector, this partnership will increase access to and adoption of cooking technologies, which will lead to significant health, economic, empowerment, and environmental impacts for communities around the world.
EVENTS
Monday, March 4, 10:30am to Noon
Official Side Event at Commission on the Status of Women – Energy Access: Critical for Women’s Health and Security (New York City, NY)
A panel co-hosted by the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves and the Energy Access Practitioner Network on the occasion of the 57th session of the Commission on the Status of Women and in celebration of International Women’s Day
The Church Center for the United Nations, Boss Room, 8th Floor
777 First Avenue at 44th Street, 2nd Floor
New York, NY
RSVP: EVENTS@UNFOUNDATION.ORG
March 18 to March 22
Clean Cooking Forum – Specific sessions on gender and women’s empowerment
March 18, 9:00am to Noon
- Alliance Gender and Empowerment Strategic Planning Meeting: Gender experts will meet to discuss the latest progress in the implementation of the Alliance’s gender and empowerment strategy. The group will address challenges and gaps in the current strategy, as well as update the document as needed.
March 20, 10:30am to Noon
- Leveraging Women’s Entrepreneurship throughout the Value Chain to Increase Adoption: Women entrepreneurs have proven invaluable to other sectors in product design, distribution, marketing, sales and after-sales service, as well as within the cookstove and fuels sector. This panel will highlight examples of successful women’s distribution networks and will provide an opportunity for the clean cookstoves and fuels sector to hear from these experts on what it takes to integrate clean cooking solutions into these existing distribution chains. Additionally, those who have leveraged women’s entrepreneurship across supply and distribution chains will share their own experiences and success stories and describe how these best practices can be replicated.
March 20, 2:00pm to 3:30pm
- What is “Gender Mainstreaming” and How to Best Empower Women Through Clean Cooking Solutions: It is widely recognized that addressing gender issues and empowering women is a critical component to scaling the sector and achieving adoption goals, but it is sometimes unclear as to how to actually implement actionable solutions within projects and companies to ensure success. This session, led by ENERGIA, will explain the concept of “gender mainstreaming” and outline how organizations can start to employ these techniques to maximize the impact on gender and women’s empowerment.
Thursday, May 30, 7:00am to 8:30am
- Official Side Event at the Women Deliver 2013 Conference – A Discussion on Empowering Women through Clean Cookstoves and Fuels (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia): The Women Deliver 2013 Conference provides a unique opportunity to raise awareness among women’s rights leaders and gender experts about the serious impacts that traditional cooking practices have on women and children around the world and the key role that women have to play in delivering the solutions. Additionally, it is an important opportunity for the Alliance to solicit advice and expertise from a wide array of leaders, entrepreneurs, and decision-makers working on women’s issues to strengthen the Alliance’s gender and empowerment strategy. Invitees will include leaders from civil society, government, private sector, academia, and relevant sectors dealing with energy, sustainability, entrepreneurship and economics, agriculture, health, gender, and climate change. The objectives of the session are to raise awareness about the important links between cookstoves and fuels and women’s health, economic empowerment, and safety, to identify and discuss opportunities and challenges in promoting and implementing gender-sensitive approaches, as well as how to best leverage the work of those working on women’s entrepreneurship to help scale adoption of clean cooking solutions.
- RSVP: chart@cleancookstoves.org