Radha’s Message for March 2015
Dear friends,
This month, as part of global efforts to celebrate International Women’s Day and the 20th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on the Women’s Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, we worked with many of our partners around the world to highlight the critical role access to cooking energy plays in achieving gender equality. There has been significant progress in women's empowerment over the past two decades, but more needs to be done, which is the message that came through loud and clear in this year's celebrations. While household energy is a key driver for improving women’s health, livelihoods and their environments, the Alliance and its partners are working to ensure that this momentum translates into policy actions and resource allocations by government and non-government actors around the world.
2015 is a significant year in global development, and the Alliance is continuing its efforts to influence the Post 2015-Sustainable Development Agenda. Our outreach is targeted at ensuring that United Nations partners, focus and donor countries, and other key players in the intergovernmental SDG negotiations understand how clean cooking interventions can support the specific goal on energy and enable success across other goals and targets. We are also suggesting indicator language that can be used to measure progress and best inform next steps, building off what others have been calling “measuring what matters.” More details on our recommendations and how you can play a part in ensuring that the Agenda reflects the best expertise in clean cooking can be seen in this month’s newsletter article on the Post-2015 Agenda.
Turning to the Alliance’s research efforts, we have been engaging in several child survival health studies around the world to measure the impacts of using clean fuels and stoves on newborn health. Many of the studies are coming to completion this year. Just this past weekend, we hosted an important meeting in Nepal of approximately 30 global researchers engaged on this topic. The workshop allowed them to share their interim findings and learnings of how to better integrate this type of research into other ongoing studies. The update from the meeting is included in the newsletter and we are looking forward to sharing some positive results by the end of the year.
I am also pleased to announce that Chef Pati Jinich is the newest member of our Chef Corps. Pati was born and raised in Mexico City and comes from a family of accomplished cooks. In addition to an ongoing series of culinary programs on TV, she has seen the household air pollution issue first-hand and is committed to helping us raise awareness around the world. We were also privileged to have our Ambassador Rocky Dawuni spreading the word on the importance of clean cooking through his panel discussion and performance at the South by Southwest Music and Film Festival (SXSW) in Austin, Texas.
I am currently in Ghana where I look forward to meeting with many counterparts working to further catalyze the sector in West Africa. I’ll report back to you about it next month. And remember to Save the Date, November 10-13 in Accra for the Clean Cooking Forum 2015.
Warm regards,
Radha