Alliance Helps Change How Millions of People in Developing Countries Cook
New Report Highlights Alliance’s Five Years of Impact from 2010-2015
Washington, DC (September 23, 2015) – Five years ago a group of leaders from around the world came together with a common vision: to change the way people in developing countries cook. While there had been efforts in the past to ensure the poorest among us no longer prepare their food as our ancestors did hundreds of years ago—over smoky, toxic fires—there was a growing consensus that to better address this silent killer, a comprehensive, market-based approach was needed.
Based on that vision, the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves was created. To mark its fifth anniversary, today the Alliance is releasing the report Five Years of Impact, highlighting major achievements since its founding and featuring key statistics, personal stories of impact, lessons learned, and testimonials from stakeholders who have supported the Alliance’s work to create a thriving global market for cleaner, more efficient cookstoves and fuels.
“For too long, cooking has been a silent killer in developing countries around the world,” former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, an Alliance Global Ambassador, notes in the report. “Finally, we are seeing a growing momentum around this issue. Thanks to the Alliance and its many partners, millions more people are now using clean and efficient cookstoves and fuels.”
Smoke from cooking over open fires and crude stoves prematurely kills more than 10,000 people every day and sickens millions more, with children and women disproportionately affected. Beyond the enormous health toll, this method of meal preparation is linked to significant deforestation and is responsible for up to 25% of the world's black carbon emissions. There is also a massive gender burden, with girls and women spending up to eight hours each day gathering fuel and cooking food while breathing in large amounts of harmful smoke.
“Together with our more than 1,300 partners, we’ve made tremendous progress over the past five years to address this global issue, putting us on track to meet or exceed our goal of reaching 100 million households with clean and efficient cookstoves and fuels by 2020,” said Radha Muthiah, CEO of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. “But we can’t stop until we reach a world where cooking no longer kills.”
As outlined in Five Years of Impact, a critical role of the Alliance has been providing early seed funding to entrepreneurs and enterprises to allow them to more easily scale operations and build a wider marketplace to facilitate broader adoption of clean cookstoves and fuels. Over the past five years, the Alliance has provided millions of dollars in funding to expand the sector, supporting a broad array of companies across Asia, Africa and Latin America.
“Since receiving Alliance funding, we’ve gone from serving consumers in one region of India to becoming the country’s largest cookstove producer,” said Neha Jenuja, CEO of Greenway Appliances. “We’ve also been able to leverage the Alliance’s support to attract additional funding. As a result, we now export our stoves to Mexico, and this year, we reached 1 million cookstove users worldwide.”
In addition to highlighting success stories like that of Greenway Appliances and others in the cookstoves and fuels sector, the report also showcases some of the Alliance’s key achievements over the past five years, such as:
- Strengthening over 200 enterprises through grants, training and investment
- Leveraging the Alliance’s own resources to attract millions of investment dollars into the cookstoves and fuels sector;
- Engaging 28 countries in the development of standards in partnership with the International Organization for Standardization;
- Helping build a broader evidence base for global action on clean cooking by supporting 40+ research studies and investing more than $5 million in research on health, gender, the environment and improving livelihoods, and;
- Training more than 175 humanitarian aid workers from 27 countries and 82 organizations to provide improved cooking and fuel technologies for crisis-affected populations.
Five years into the Alliance’s 10-year strategy, a broad selection of leaders in business, government, nonprofit and development are praising the growing momentum in the cookstoves and fuels sector:
To learn more about the Alliance’s work, download a complete version of the Five Years of Impact report.
Media Contact: Kip Patrick, Director of Communications; kpatrick@cleancookstoves.org; phone +1 240-308-1320