Radha’s Message for November-December 2014
Dear Friends,
This year has been momentous for the issue of clean cooking and for the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves as we wrap up Phase 1 of our efforts and move into Phase 2. We continue to champion the issue of clean cooking and household air pollution to move it from the periphery of the development and environment discussion closer to the core. The Alliance has also grown considerably during the past year with now over 1,000 partners in the public, private, and NGO arenas actively engaging in the sector.
During 2014, the Alliance deepened its engagement in our focus countries to support market development in a number of ways, by strengthening capacity and innovation within existing enterprises to ensure that high-quality cookstoves and fuels could be brought to scale, bringing in new manufacturers and distributors to further enhance the sector’s reach, creating awareness of and mobilizing capital for investment ready enterprises, integrating women throughout the cookstove and fuel value chains through our Women’s Empowerment Fund, and advocating for the advancement of policies that will enable and accelerate the clean cookstoves and fuels market. The Alliance also furthered the development of the standards process through its engagement with the International Organization for Standardization and we are now closer to achieving a set of global standards that will help us deliver high-quality, effective, and independently tested products.
We continue to build the evidence base for health, environment, and gender interventions, with some very promising early results from our child survival studies around the world. While we remain technology and fuel neutral, the Alliance has prioritized efforts to ensure clean fuel supply in many of our focus countries to achieve health and adoption impacts. We have also effectively partnered with a host of UN and NGO partners to ensure access to appropriate fuels and stoves in humanitarian settings. Finally, we have begun our country-specific awareness campaigns that will help inform the millions of men and women who, in their very purchasing decisions, have the ability to solve the problem of household air pollution.
I thank you all for the invaluable contributions that you are making directly or indirectly to support the growth of this sector. We at the Alliance look forward to working with you in 2015 as we move into Phase 2 of our work to continue to save lives, empower women, improve livelihoods, and protect our environment.
My best wishes for the new year,
Radha Muthiah
Executive Director