Partner Spotlight: SNV Netherlands Development Organisation
SNV is an international development organization established in the Netherlands in 1965, which provides capacity building and advisory services to local organisations in over 35 developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
SNV’s work spans three main sectors: agriculture; water, sanitation & hygiene; and renewable energy. As part of its renewable energy work, SNV focuses on two interlinked goals: i) to provide clean and secure energy access for households and/or small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs); and ii) to develop capacities in the sector to ensure that these interventions are sustained.
In 2010, SNV became a founding partner of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, seeing it as an unprecedented opportunity to raise worldwide awareness of the ‘silent killer in the kitchen’ and to share and leverage lessons rapidly emerging from the clean cooking sector.
Since 1989, SNV has supported national biogas programmes in 18 countries, and as of 2013, almost 580,000 domestic biogas plants, each with a clean stove, have been installed in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In 2013 alone, over 40,000 biomass-fueled improved cookstoves have been distributed via 600 local and national organisations supported by SNV, providing access to clean cooking devices to 230,000 people and raising the income of entrepreneurs along the clean cookstove value chain. Such results are currently being scaled through the design of innovative business and finance models that help create tangible purchase and revenue opportunities for even the most remote cookstove users and producers.
In order to address deforestation and climate change more systematically, SNV is also increasingly looking at building integrated woodfuel and alternative fuel value chains, testing innovative stove-fuel combinations, and working on the creation of a conducive environment for the sustainable use of natural resources.
In close consultation with the Alliance, SNV is actively engaged in the development and coordination of national alliances, for example in Bangladesh and Kenya. This year, in an effort to keep its distribution strategies informed by the most recent knowledge in the clean cookstove area, SNV initiated a broad effort to reflect upon existing stove distribution models. Together with the Alliance, SNV commissioned Practical Action Consulting to execute a study drawing the lessons from various cookstove distribution models around the world and exploring a number of innovative distribution chains which the clean cooking sector could learn from.
As part of this initiative and in the frame of the Ghana National Clean Cookstoves and Fuels Conference, the three organisations will be convening a multi-stakeholder workshop in Accra this April. The workshop will focus on identifying the success factors, opportunities and barriers for the expansion of Base of the Pyramid (BoP) stove distribution markets, which should help gain critical insight to reach the Alliance’s target of promoting the adoption of 100 million clean cookstoves and fuels by 2020.
For more information on SNV’s work on clean cooking solutions, please consult our website.
You can also access SNV’s latest newsletter on clean cookstoves on this page, and register here to be included in our mailing list.