dolution

Clean Cooking

In a small village in
rural Kenya, a woman bent over an open fire pit in the center of her hut
cooking the evening meal. That morning, she had spent two hours collecting
wood, animal dung, and scrap paper to use as fuel. Now, as she stirred the pot,
the cook fire gave off a steady stream of sooty, acrid smoke, which filled the
room despite a ventilation hole in the roof. The woman’s young son played
dangerously close to the open flame, while her daughter, coughing from the
smoke, tried to read by the weak light of the fire.

In 2018, a similar scene
was repeated in households with around 3 billion people every day across the
developing world, with devastating effects on human health, the environment,
and economic development.

Indoor air pollution
from open cookstoves is a killer. The World Health Organization has estimated
that soot, particles, and smoke from cooking is one of the worst risk factors
for health in developing countries, causing 4.3 million premature deaths a
year, mostly from lung and heart disease. Open cookstoves also lead to
disfiguring burns, asthma, eye damage, and pregnancy complications. The effects
are greatest on women and young children, who spend the most time near the
hearth.

Women and girls also
suffer from head and back injuries, animal attacks, and sexual violence while
searching for and carrying heavy loads of fuel, often far from home. Time spent
collecting fuel is time not spent attending school, working at a paid job, or
running a small business.

Primitive cooking methods
also harm the environment. Cutting trees to produce wood or charcoal leads to
deforestation, loss of Page 209 biodiversity, and watershed degradation.
Moreover, the combustion of biomass in cooking produces more than a quarter of
the world’s black carbon, or soot. Scientists now believe that soot is second
only to carbon dioxide in its overall contribution to global warming.
Policymakers have been intrigued by the fact that while carbon dioxide stays in
the atmosphere for decades, black carbon washes out within days or weeks.
Reducing soot in the atmosphere would thus have a much more immediate effect on
global warming than cutting carbon emissions.

In 2010, the United
Nations Foundation, in collaboration with several governments (including the
United States), launched the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, with the
ambitious goal of “100 by 20″–that 100 million households worldwide adopt
clean and efficient cookstoves and fuels by 2020. The alliance recognized that
reaching this goal would require more than money; it would require technical
innovation in fuels and stove design, new mechanisms of financing, and
on-the-ground campaigns to engage users from a wide range of cultures and
cooking traditions. It would also require the support of businesses-large and
small.

Many companies saw an
opportunity in the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. CEMEX, a global
building products company based in Mexico, developed and contributed $2 million
worth of clean-burning concrete cookstoves. Marks & Spencer, the British
retailer, joined the Alliance and committed to helping employees of its
suppliers of products such as coffee and textiles to cook more efficiently; and
it had already partnered with UNICEF (the United Nations Children’s Fund) to
install 40,000 clean cookstoves in Bangladesh. Dow

Many companies saw an
opportunity in the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. CEMEX, a global
building products company based in Mexico, developed and contributed $2 million
worth of clean-burning concrete cookstoves. Marks & Spencer, the British
retailer, joined the Alliance and committed to helping employees of its
suppliers of products such as coffee and textiles to cook more efficiently; and
it had already partnered with UNICEF (the United Nations Children’s Fund) to install
40,000 clean cookstoves in Bangladesh. Dow Corning, a Midland, Michigan-based
maker of silicon-based materials, donated both money and expertise in
manufacturing and material science to the Alliance.

At the same time,
motivated by greater attention to the issue, social entrepreneurs across the
globe began generating innovative ideas about how to design, manufacture, and
finance more efficient and cleaner cookstoves-potentially a “win-win” for
the environment and human health and well-being.

For example, in the west
African country of Ghana, Suraj Wahab founded a small business, Toyola Energy
Ltd., to produce a cookstove he invented called the gyapa (“good fire”).
His company constructed the stove from locally sourced materials-scrap metal
from construction sites and fired clay liners. Because it was designed to burn
charcoal, a fuel used by 30 percent of Ghanaian households, twice as
efficiently as in an open fire, each stove over the course of its life would
prevent the release of global warming emissions equivalent to the amount
generated by a Honda Civic driven for one year.

Wahab had difficulty
obtaining needed capital until he partnered with E+Co, a clean energy nonprofit
that invested $270,000. E+Co helped Toyola calculate the carbon offset value of
its cookstoves, which was then monetized and sold to the investment banking
firm Goldman Sachs. Within a short period, Toyola employed 150 people and had
sold more than 150,000 cookstoves to eager Ghanaians, who welcomed the cost
savings and health benefits they provided. More than a quarter of the company’s
revenue came from the sale of carbon offsets, helping keep the price to
consumers as low as $7. Similar stories of creative partnerships were occurring
around the globe.

The nonprofit Trees,
Water, & People, based in Fort Collins, Colorado, teamed with local
partners to build and distribute 75,000 cookstoves in Guatemala, El Salvador,
Honduras, and Nicaragua. Their stove was an insulated combustion chamber topped
by a removable steel griddle adapted to cooking tortillas and a chimney pipe to
vent smoke through a roof hole, reducing indoor air pollution by more than 80
percent. Other organizations, such as Solar Cookers International, experimented
with ways to harness the power of the sun-a completely renewable, clean, and
free source of energy-to boil water and cook food. Page 210

By 2017, 80 million
cookstoves had been distributed, and the Alliance was closing in on its
ambitious goal. “As we build a cookstoves market to the scale necessary to
combat and defeat this silent killer,” said its executive director, “the strong
support and unique expertise of our partners and champions will be invaluable.

” Discussion
Questions

1. In what ways would
the widespread adoption of clean cookstoves address the global environmental
issues discussed in this chapter?

2. In what ways would
the widespread adoption of clean cookstoves address the issues of economic
development and poverty discussed in this chapter?

3. Which sectors (e.g.,
government, business, civil society) would need to be involved in a successful
campaign to promote clean cookstoves in the developing world, and what would be
the contributions of each?

4. What would be the benefit to multinational
corporations, such as CEMEX, Marks and Spencer, and Dow Corning, of
participating in this effort? What distinctive contributions can social
entrepreneurs make to promoting clean cookstoves?