Radha’s Message for August 2014
August has been a very busy month at the Alliance as we gear up a very full autumn of market building activities, advocacy and awareness-raising events. I thought you might appreciate a preview as you continue to move full steam ahead on your own important efforts.
In September, we will be participating in the United Nations Secretary General’s Climate Summit in New York and continuing to advocate on the effectiveness of cleaner and more efficient cookstoves and fuels in mitigating climate change. We will have several of our government champions, Leadership Council members, and Ambassadors there to help convey this message.
Also in September, Deutsche Bank and the Alliance will host a historic Clean Cookstoves Investor Roundtable in New York. The goal of the event is to bring together two dozen Development Finance Institutions and investors to determine the best possible fund structures and instruments to effectively mobilize and deploy up to $200m in investment in the clean cookstoves and fuels sector over the next three years.
To round out the month, we are also working on having a strong presence at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) to showcase the tremendous progress that the sector has made in just the last four years since Secretary Clinton launched the Alliance and brought the issue to the world stage. We hope to also share some of the exciting outcomes of our Investor Roundtable and new commitments at CGI and encourage other corporate partners to join us in fueling our sector.
October kicks off with ISO working group and global testing center meetings in Guatemala to further our progress towards actionable and meaningful standards for the sector. We have had a tremendous response to participate and contribute to these meetings and we expect some strong outcomes. We will also formally launch our in-country market-building activities in Guatemala at the same time.
October will also see us work to support the Government of India and GIZ in the annual cookstoves sector meeting. Our work in India will be heavily focused on getting cleaner fuels to market, building awareness, and supporting the dissemination of knowledge through the community.
That same month, we will also kick off a customer awareness campaign in Kenya. We have been engaging with our Kenyan partners to determine both the target locations, channels and messaging that will aid their cookstove and fuel distribution and sales efforts. We will be testing a variety of approaches in the lead up to Christmas with co-branding, faith-based institution awareness creation, hot spot marketing, etc.
We expect to release the final market and province-level assessment and customer research results for China and, with the government, announce the target locations, goals and intervention plans for clean cookstoves and fuels for the next several years.
This is particularly exciting for us as we move into Phase 2 of our work and embark on the final part of the equation around enhancing demand. We will, however, continue to enable the environment through research, testing, standards, and strengthen enterprises as we have done since 2010.
As I mentioned in last month’s newsletter, we will mark the transition from Phase 1 to Phase 2 with a gathering of global influencers, investors, and leaders. This event is titled “Cookstoves Future Summit: Fueling Markets, Catalyzing Action, Changing Lives” and will take place in New York City on November 20 and 21. Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Minister Lynne Featherstone (UK), Minister Borge Brende (Norway) and Minister Hannah Tetteh (Ghana) will co-host this event. Our goal is to share the progress the Alliance has achieved and our impact to date; our roadmap charting our course from roughly 20m households adopting cleaner and more efficient cookstoves and fuels in Phase 1 to 60m households by the end of Phase 2 in 2017. We look to generate further commitments in the form of grants, investments, and policies that will further support this market. You will be hearing more from us on the Summit during September.
As you can see we have much going on and this reflects the very dynamic nature of our sector. Thanks as always for all your efforts to transform the way the world cooks!
Warm regards,
Radha