Carbon Credits to Bring Down Cost of Clean Stoves for Rural Poor
“While using carbon credit sales to boost a company’s revenues has been attempted, the new trend is to ride on the additional revenue generation potential to prune the upfront cost of the product that earns these credits.”
After the success of a nationwide rollout of compact fluorescent lights using the same model, Envirofit — an expert in clean cooking stove technology that addresses the hazards of indoor air pollution in poor rural households — has been trying it out along with its partner Shell Foundation.”
They first tried it in Africa, where the results were encouraging. The strategy is now being applied to India, where as many as five lakh women and children die prematurely every year due to the smoke caused from cooking on traditional stoves inside homes. The clean stove brings down the emissions substantially.”
“In Africa, we found a lot of demand for the clean charcoal burning stove, but affordability was a big question,” says Pradeep Pursnani, Business Director, Breathing Space, Shell Foundation. So, to help bring down its cost, we started a Shell Foundation Envirofit Carbon Fund with a corpus of up to $1 million. The Fund is independent and technology agnostic and will provide tailor-made solutions to stove manufacturers, women’s groups and MFIs to make sale and purchase of stoves affordable, he explains.”