Secretary Clinton says Cookstoves among the Big Ideas that Empower Women

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in her address at the Breakfast with Women Entrepreneurs Attending the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship in Washington DC launched the Secretary’s Innovation Award for the Empowerment of Women and Girls.

Talking about the kind of ideas that the Fund will support to scale up enterprises, she referred to the program on cookstoves that help women by reducing fuel usage and reduces the burden of gathering firewood. "We’re working on a cook stove project so that we can provide safe and effective cook stoves for women so they don’t have to travel for miles to get trees and branches and look for scrub to light their stoves to feed their families. "

Excerpts from Ms Clinton's Remarks on April 28:

"This morning, I’m pleased to outline several new avenues we are pursuing to expand opportunities so more women can turn their entrepreneurial dreams and innovations into successful businesses that generate income for themselves and their families, create jobs, expand markets, and fuel progress in their communities..."

"First, through a program called Tech Women, we will enhance the technological capacity of women in seven Muslim majority countries, promising entrepreneurs in the tech field will be paired with American mentors and given four to six weeks of training in American tech centers such as Silicon Valley. (Applause.)

Second, we are working with Japan, the chair of APEC this year, to organize an APEC women’s entrepreneurship summit this fall in Japan, focusing on policy, human resources and financing issues. The aim is to galvanize the Asia-Pacific region to unleash the potential of women entrepreneurs and business leaders, and we’re very pleased that the 1,000 – the 10,000 Women’s Initiative, sponsored by Goldman Sachs, has agreed to be a sponsor of the summit. And we thank you so much for that. (Applause.)

Third, today we are launching the Secretary’s – that’s me – the Secretary’s – (laughter) –International Fund for Women and Girls. This public-private partnership will provide high-impact grants to NGOs working to advance the economic, social, and political progress of women. The women’s fund will bring together the resources and expertise of both the public and the private sectors to invest in effective and innovative solutions for issues like economic empowerment, climate change, combating violence against women, and improved access to education and healthcare..."

"I will never forget being in Managua, Nicaragua and there was a little television set in the corner of this market, and I was talking to women who were part of a microcredit organization. All they wanted to talk to me about was my visit to India, to the Self-Employed Women’s Association, which they had seen on their TV in Nicaragua, and they wanted to know what that was like.

A few months later, I was in Cape Town, South Africa with a group of women who were originally squatters and then became builders of their own communities, scraping together the money to buy the land, then to get the construction material, and they, too, wanted to know about the women that I had met elsewhere and what they could learn from them. We want not to reinvent the wheel every single time. If you’re facing obstacles, we want to help you overcome them. (Applause.)

And finally, I’m delighted to announce the creation of the Secretary’s Innovation Award for the Empowerment of Women and Girls. Through this effort, we hope to build on pioneering approaches to empowering women politically, economically, and socially around the world. This award will be funded by the Rockefeller Foundation – we’re going to hear about it in a minute – and it reflects the State Department’s increased emphasis on public-private partnerships as a way to address cross-cutting global challenges, particularly those affecting women and girls.

Now, we hope to receive entries that describe how specific innovations have improved the lives of women and girls and proposals for how they can be scaled up and applied more broadly. These entries will be reviewed by an eminent panel of jurors, chaired by Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women Issues Melanne Verveer, and Rockefeller Foundation President Judith Rodin. The panel will recommend the first two recipients of the award in 2010, both of whom will receive up to a $500,000 grant to fund their programs. (Applause.)

And there are so many ideas that can fit into this, ideas – I remember being in Senegal and going out into the country to see a new kind of well that made it possible for women to get water in their own village instead of having to walk for hours. We’re working on a cook stove project so that we can provide safe and effective cook stoves for women so they don’t have to travel for miles to get trees and branches and look for scrub to light their stoves to feed their families. We’re looking for ways to end domestic violence by making it clear that it is a crime, ways to partner to end FGM, which is a health hazard to women, especially young girls, but then later in their reproductive years.

We have so many ideas that are not just, well, have a woman run for office or have a woman run a business, but change the conditions in which women live, change the attitude about sending girls to school, provide a fund so that girls have access to clean restrooms, so that they continue to go to school at the end of primary school when it becomes more difficult for them to do so if there is no safe, clean restroom. There’s so many ways that we can empower women. So we want to unleash the entrepreneurial creative imagination of all of you to help us."

Enhance Efficiency of Use of Agro Residue

Enhancing the efficiency of the use of agro residue based fuels and cowdung cakes must occupy the highest attention, next to which is firewood, says a paper by H S Mukunda, S Dasappa, P J Paul, N K S Rajan, Mahesh Yagnaraman, D Ravi Kumar and Mukund Deogaonkar in the Current Science issue of March 2010. The paper examines the development of First Energy's Oorja gasifier stove in a paper titled "Gasifier stoves – science, technology and field outreach."

The paper says that cowdung can perhaps be integrated into the strategy for better fuel making without any special stove design for cowdung cakes; fuels based on agro-residues and cowdung should be dealt with as a separate development task.

H S Mukunda, P J Paul and N K S Rajan are in the Department of Aerospace Engineering, and S Dasappa is in the Centre for Sustainable Technologies, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore; Mahesh Yagnaraman and Mukund Deogaonkar are in First Energy Private Limited, D. Ravi Kumar is in Energy Division, GE, New Delhi.

The paper says that while wood and agro-residues are both biomass, the amount of agroresidues used on a per household basis is nearly twice that of wood. While it is generally understood that wood use itself is inefficient, the degree of wastefulness of agro-residues is enormous, a fact about which there is little appreciation all-round.

If developing improved cook stoves on firewood is considered important, it is far more important to develop stoves to burn agro-residues that are  light and odd shaped to obtain high efficiency and reduce the emissions. The magnitude of the use of cowdung cake as a source for fuel is non-insignificant, but its use is about as energy-inefficient as agro-residues. However, the emissions from its use are significant and any improvement in the use of cowdung cake should address this aspect as well.

Coal is used in a wasteful way largely because of ignition problem. Many of the stoves are lit in the open for the volatiles to escape (about 30% in comparison to biomass with 70% volatiles) until coal becomes virtually coke and its combustion becomes vigorous. China that has encouraged a large production of coal-powder based beehive briquettes has serious indoor air pollution problems related to this fact, the Paper says.

Grameen Shakti plans to Construct Million Cookstoves by 2012

Grameen Shakti has set a target of constructing 10 lakh (one million) improved cook stoves by 2012, reports the Dhaka Daily Star. In addition it plans to double solar home system (SHS) sales in 2010 and establish more biogas plants and improved cook stoves to expand green and sustainable energy.

Along with focusing on expanding the sales of improved cook stoves, the organisation will increase more biogas plants -- a jump by almost four times -- from over 4,000 units in 2009 to 16,000 this year. It aims to sell 2,20,000 solar home systems in 2010. The 'not-for-profit' company said it sold 1.13 lakh solar home systems in 2009, according to the Daily Star.

Established in 1996 to provide green energy solutions to rural areas with no electricity, GS has so far installed over 3,60,000 PV (photovoltaic) SHSs, benefiting around 3 million. As per installation, the power generation capacity of these SHS is 17.5 MW.

Network expansion by Grameen Shakti and offers to sell SHSs both on credit and cash also helped lure buyers to green energy technologies in the rural areas, says the Newspaper.

In a bid to promote sustainable energy technology, the organisation now makes a mark in making improved cooking stoves, which are believed to cut fuel wood consumption by up to 50 percent than traditional stoves.
According to Grameen Shakti, improved cooking stoves help households reduce firewood consumption from 20 kilograms to 40 kilograms, saving between Tk 250 to Tk 500 a month.

Shell Foundation Partners MFIs to Tackle the Affordability Challenge

Shell Foundation has partnered with  Grameen Koota, a micro-finance institution, for a  village level  awareness  campaign on Indoor Air Pollution (IAP). This brings to the doorstep of villagers new, improved stoves and micro finance. Together, these address the three big 'A's of the challenge of Indoor Air Pollution: Awareness, Availability and Affordability.

The joint effort of Shell Foundation, Grameen Koota and stove manufacturers Envirofit, First Energy and SELCO connects all the three dots by making improved cook stoves affordable through loans. The partnership with Grameen Koota covers all of Karnataka.

Along with field coordinators from a local NGO, Navya Disha, loan officers from Grameen Koota travel across villages to talk to people about the issues of IAP, the Shell Foundation IAP Awareness campaign, the availability of improved cook stoves and loans from Grameen Koota to facilitate the purchase of stoves.

Names of members from the audience, who attend the demonstrations, interested in purchasing stoves are passed on to stove vendors by field coordinators and loan officers. The stove vendors then deliver the stoves to the customers.

According to Pradeep Pursnani, Business Director, Breathing Space, Shell Foundation "It is great to finally see the Stove-MFI model being put into practice.  The team has been working hard to set up a dedicated stove team, coordinate activities with manufacturers and get everyone trained to hit the ground running..  This initiative will address the affordability barrier and help the stove industry reach out to customers who need an Improved Cook Stove to combat indoor air pollution. All eyes are on this pilot. A sustainable route to market will encourage other MFIs to extend these products to their member base."

In order to facilitate the availability of stoves to the maximum number of IAP-affected population, Shell Foundation has introduced a truck to deliver stoves to interested customers.

Indoor Air Pollution (IAP) is one of world’s biggest killers. More than 1.5 million people die prematurely each year and tens of millions more experience ill-health because of the fumes they breathe while cooking on open fires and traditional stoves, according to the World Health Organisation.

The activation of MFIs for the campaign seeks to explore pathways to the market and is directed at creating sustainable partners who would over the long term address the market as collaborative marketers.

Says Anuradha Bhavnani, "Indoor Air Pollution impacts the health of the world poor due to lack of access to clean and affordable energy. Microfinance  is recognized as one of the most important tools to provide financial services to millions of unreached/under-served poor. Hence, building a bridge and linking the two i.e addressing IAP through the MFI partners and there  beneficiary households is the logical link to test out."

IAP impacts more than 90% of the population in the world’s poorest countries – and can be “equivalent to consuming two packs of cigarettes each day” (WHO 2006 Fuel for Life report).

Toxic chemicals inhaled include Carbon Monoxide (CO) and a range of particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5) that penetrate deep into the lungs leading to a wide variety of illnesses including: pneumonia, chronic respiratory disease, heart disease, low birth weight and probably tuberculosis.

There is also a growing link between IAP and climate change. With half the world’s population burning wood, dung and other biomass each year creates million of tonnes of Carbon Dioxide – as well as other climate change creating emissions such as Methane and so-called Black Carbon (soot).

UC Berkeley Sensors Takes Top Prize in Vodafone Innovation Project

A path breaking model of “stove use monitoring system” (SUMS) developed by UC Berkeley was awarded a first prize of $300,000 in the 2010 Vodafone Americas Foundation Wireless Innovation Project. The Foundation selects three wireless projects,with the potential to save lives and solve critical global challenges. The winners were selected from more than 100 qualified applications from universities and NGOs from across the United States of America.

The "100 Million Stoves" device is a simple wireless SUMS,  powered with the excess heat of the stove, which can be attached to the millions of new low-emission stoves being used in developing regions. The device will record usage data and send them to a dedicated reader carried by someone in the village making a monthly walk through. The cumulated data will then be uploaded via cell phone to a central database for systematic processing. The low-cost technology will allow the assessment of household energy programs, enable feedback from users, and provide transparent verification of carbon credits.

According to Kirk. R. Smith, Professor of Global Environmental Health, UC Berkeley, "The wireless SUMS can be deployed in a careful sub-sample across millions of households in a statistically valid manner. Unlike household visits, the monitors provide unique and valuable information that can be scaled to millions."

The "100 Million Stoves" team consists of Smith's research group, three small Berkeley companies — BioLite, Electronically Monitoring Ecosystems, and Berkeley Air Monitoring Group — and the Department of Environmental Health Engineering at Sri Ramachandra University in Chennai, India. Together they have built prototypes of the wireless SUMS, and the Vodafone award will help bring the project to the next stage of implementation and scale. The team plans to use the device in trials and its initial application will be in India as part of the country's National Biomass Cook-stoves Initiative.

"Soon it will be ready for use by groups around the world wishing to validate carbon credits for stove programs on the international carbon market. In addition, it can also serve as the basis for other devices to remotely and efficiently monitor the use and effectiveness of household health and energy interventions for research, program evaluation, and user feedback.", says Professor Smith.

Indian Government prepares Action Plan for Improved Cookstoves Deployment

The Government of India is preparing an action plan for development and deployment of cook stoves in the country, the Union Minister for New and Renewable Energy, Dr. Farooq Abdullah has said in a written reply in Lok Sabha, the Indian Parliament, on Friday, April 16, according to a Government of India Press Information Bureau Release.

The statement says that in order to make smokeless stoves popular the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy launched a National Biomass Cook-stove Initiative during 2009. The primary aim of the initiative is to develop and enhance the availability of better and efficient family and community size Biomass Cook-stoves for household and industrial applications in the country.

It also emphasizes on enhancement of technical capacity in the country by setting up testing, certification and monitoring facilities and strengthening R&D programmes in technical institutions of the country.

In this regard, the Ministry has constituted a Core Group and sanctioned a project to assess present status of various types of improved Biomass Cook-stoves currently available, their suitability and delivery mechanisms and to prepare an action plan for development and deployment of cook-stoves.

Simultaneously, the Ministry has identified four test centers for carrying out performance testing.

COPD and Indoor Air Pollution

Katelyn Harding writing in the COPD Foundation blog takes note of the Indoor Air Pollution Campaigns and the question of impact on COPD:

"Here’s something I learned while working on the latest issue of the Digest: Every year 2 million people in developing countries die from Indoor Air Pollution [IAP]. Of those 2 million deaths, 54 percent are from COPD.

Imagine that. These people, who cook their food using biomass fuels—wood, charcoal, crop residues, animal dung, coal—are using primitive and inefficient stoves, which results in IAP, or fumes, smoke and contaminants created from the indoor cook stoves.

According to a 2009 study from the World Health Organization and the United Nations Development Programme, 3 billion people—or almost half of humanity—rely on traditional biomass as the available modern energy services fail to meet their needs.

So what can be done to combat this massive problem that affects 600-800 million households worldwide?

Simon Bishop, head of Policy and Communications at the Shell Foundation, says the most effective solution is Improved Cook Stoves [ICS].

The Shell Foundation, the corporate foundation of the energy company and Envirofit International, a US non-profit, began a partnership in 2007 designed to create a global ICS business distributing millions of ICS to developing countries in an effort to reduce IAP. Their goal is to see 10 million stoves sold in 5 countries over the next 5 years.

So far, Envirofit have sold more than 100,000 ICS in southern India.

Simon says it’s hard to predict if ICS will lead to a reduction in health impacts, including COPD.

“If you’ve got indoor air pollution, and you put an improved cook stove in a home, it will reduce pollution by anything between 40 and 90 percent. But is that enough to reduce COPD cases by 40-90 percent as well? At this stage there is not enough medical evidence to prove this link. We urgently need to plug this gap in medical research.”

It will take time to prove the impact of putting an ICS in someone’s home and the incidence it has on COPD, but for now, I think it’s a pretty great start, don’t you?

Shimoga's Village Health Workers Campaign on Indoor Air Pollution

In a pathbreaking initiative, Shell Foundation today joined hands with village level health workers, the Anganwadi workers, in the Shikaripur Taluk of Shimoga district to spread awareness on the dangers of smoke in the kitchen and propagate the adoption of improved cook stoves. The Anganwadi system is managed by Anganwadi workers from the community who are trained in health, nutrition and child-care. She is in-charge of an Anganwadi, which covers a population of 1000. A group of Anganwadis is supervised and guided by a Child Development Projects Officer (CDPO). There are about 300 such workers in the Shikaripur Taluk who report to the Taluk Health Officer and CDPO.

Over the past two days, nearly 100 anganwadi workers have been trained to take the IAP campaign to over a 100 villages of Shikaripur Taluk, effectively covering 100,000 people over the next one month. Each Anganwadi worker has a coverage of around one thousand people.

Says Simon Bishop, Head of Policy and Communications, Shell Foundation, "More than 400,000 people in India die each year from toxic fumes inhaled while cooking on open fires - yet most affected households don't even realise the smoke is bad for them. Furthermore, few people realise so-called 'Improved Cook stoves' can dramatically
reduce fumes. They also use at least 40% less wood, which means people can either save money on fuel or save time collecting it. We are delighted to be partnering with the District Administration - and its Anganwadi workers - to raise awareness about smoke and how it can best be tackled."

The launch of the campaign brings together efforts that have included support from the Karnataka Chief Minister's Office, various ministries of the state government, the district authorities, the Zilla Parishad and the Community health officers. Probably for the first time ever, we have had the Anganwadi system, the Community Health Officers, the DC’s office, the Zilla Parishad, the State Ministries,

The campaign conceived and initiated by the Shell Foundation is being run with support from stove manufacturers Envirofit and SELCO who are training and providing stoves for demonstrations.

This route to market is expected to provide yet another avenue for category education as well as outreach for adoption of stoves.


Based on the results of the current phase, the campaign can be extended to all the 2000 anganwadi workers in Shimoga district. The first batch of 100 anganwadi workers were picked by the CDPO in the taluk to launch the exercise.

Workers were trained in batches of 50 on the health issues of indoor air pollution and the formats of communicating the issue to village people.

Thereafter, they were also trained in stove demonstrations. The angawadi workers would now take the campaign on their own to their villages and provide the campaign grassroot outreach.

This is part of the Shell Foundation's wider 'Room to Breathe' campaign, which aims to save lives, improve livelihoods and reduce climate change emissions by tackling kitchen smoke.

Cookstoves: The Secret Weapon Against Poverty and Climate Change

Stoking up a cookstove revolution is the way to beat poverty and climate change, says Asden Awards which has over the past decade rewarded and championed some of the world's leading stove programmes.

Excerpts from the Ashden Report: "Our calculations suggest that a global programme to manufacture the half-billion improved stoves needed to convert the world’s poor to safer cooking could save hundreds of thousands of young lives a year - and at the same time cut global greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of up to one billion tonnes of CO2 a year.

Such investments ought to attract large sums through the carbon market. We calculate that improved cooking stoves can keep a tonne of CO2 out of the atmosphere for as little as $1-3 – an exceedingly good deal in a market where offsets can be sold for $20-30 a tonne.

Ashden Award winner Aprovecho, is collaborating with China’s largest manufacturer of domestic stoves, Shengzhou Stove Manufacturer (SSM), to mass produce lightweight portable ceramic stoves, based on the rocket design. The company has already sold more than 110,000 stoves mainly through distributors in countries like India, South Africa and Chile.

The stoves last around three years and cost as little as $8 each. They cut fuel use by 40 per cent or more and reduce smoke and carbon monoxide emissions by more than 50 per cent. The stoves will typically cut greenhouse gas emissions by more than one tonne a year, or as much as two tonnes if the fuel comes from deforestation. This will result in reductions in emissions at a cost of only around $2 per tonne of CO2.

Despite their growing popularity, the acceptance of improved stoves can be a problem. One study in Mexico of early Patsari stoves found that 50% of women abandoned them in favour of their old, more dangerous stoves. GIRA worked closely with users to improve the design, and 70% of families now use their Patsari stove on a regular basis. This highlights the importance of looking at both the technology and building a relationship with the users.
Although many women dislike the smoke, for some it has a value. For instance, keeping away malaria-carrying mosquitoes and killing bugs that lurk in their thatched roofs.

A study, in Bangladesh, found that women said they knew about the health benefits of new stoves, but were cautious about adopting them ahead of family, friends of community leaders. Many said they feared the new stoves might change their husbands’ views about their cooking.
“People tend to reject a technology that an opinion leader has rejected,” says Grant Miller of Stanford Medical School, who organised the study. In future, far greater effort needs to go into both cook-friendly design of stoves and in ‘social marketing’ to educate women about the benefits of new stoves, he says.

Getting the technology and design of stoves right is essential to ensure their widespread adoption. They need to be culturally appropriate. But equally governments, businesses and development organisations need to promote and replicate the most effective stoves or the necessary scale of uptake will never be achieved. Carbon finance may be significant in achieving this.

Working closely with communities to overcome the barriers to adoption is essential to squaring this circle. The good news is that the costs are not great, the mechanics of scaling up production are not complex – and the benefits are multiple, including better health, improved rates of child survival, better lives for women, improved local environments and cost-effective measures to tackle climate change.

“There is now a compelling case for getting improved stoves to millions more people,” says Sarah Butler Sloss, Founder Director of the Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy. “Better stoves improve health, save lives, help mitigate the effects of climate change while also saving money.”

Read the full report here.

Is Kitchen Smoke Killing the Monsoons?

There seem to be many a scientific proponent of the premise that the increasingly erratic monsoons in the subcontinent have a correlation with Black Carbon (soot) from incomplete combustion of fossil fuels. Oceanographer, writer, Danielle Meitiv captures the scientific work done so far in her blog.

Says Danielle, pollutants, particularly black carbon (BC), are affecting the monsoons by a process that starts in the winter when soot combines with dust blown from the west, creating huge clouds of haze that hug the southern slopes of the Himalayas.

Danielle explains, "The BC in these clouds absorb solar radiation, warming the air even faster than usual. This draws more moisture to the region sooner, causing the early monsoon to intensify. This theory is known as the Elevated Heat Pump, as the soot acts to pump heat up the Himalayan slopes. Observations show a widespread and sustained warming in the pre-monsoon season over the last three decades. In that same time period, early monsoon rainfall has increased by 20% ."

"Over the oceans, BC has a different, although equally damaging effect. BC combines with other anthropogenic aerosols, forming Atmospheric Brown Clouds (ABCs), large plumes of particles that can stretch over whole continents or ocean basins. These ABCs absorb solar radiation in the atmosphere, causing dimming below. This reduction of irradiance reduces evaporation and cools the surface, leading to a weakening of the later monsoon."

"The combined impact of these two phenomena, the Elevated Heat Pump and Solar Dimming, increases flooding during the early months of monsoon, and causes drought later on. Some studies suggest that over time the result will be an overall weakening of the monsoon and a reduction of rainfall over the region. Reduction in rainfall of great concern because in South Asia there is a strong positive correlation between the amount of precipitation and food production. The Indian summer monsoon is the biggest source of freshwater to the region: over 70% of the annual precipitation over India occurs during the summer monsoon."