In Africa, Clinton Will See a Continent Starved for Aid, Change
“Hillary Clinton’s weeklong trip to sub-Saharan Africa takes her to a continent hungry for economic growth and political accountability but still shackled by poverty and government corruption.”
One of her last events on her trip will highlight a priority issue for Clinton: cookstoves. As the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves notes, cooking is one of the most dangerous activities for a woman in many developing countries.”
Nearly three billion people use traditional cookstoves that burn wood and create smoke that causes almost 2 million premature deaths annually — more than twice the number from malaria, according to the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. Breathing in toxic fumes, women and children develop pneumonia, emphysema, cataracts, lung cancer and other illnesses.”
At a Peace Corps building in Addis Ababa, Clinton will meet with local women who make money selling new, clean cookstoves.”
“The next time you sit down with your own family to eat, please take a moment to imagine the smell of smoke, feel it in your lungs, see the soot building up on the walls,” Clinton said in September of 2010. New, clean cookstoves, she said, can save millions of lives.”
“The benefits from this initiative,” she said, “will be cleaner and safer homes, and that will, in turn, ripple out for healthier families, stronger communities, and more stable societies.”