17 March 2016
It’s not easy to make inventions for the poor. Why did some charity projects fail while others succeed? At the International Technology Exhibition CES 2016, the story of “cookstoves” of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves spread the inspiration on what charity projects need to consider.
There are many ways to the same goal, but it’s important for people to accept changes. “People don't resist change. They resist being changed” said Peter Senge, a famous organization developer.
In September 2010, the former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton and representatives of many international organizations came to New York to talk on… cookstoves. The exciting talks lasted for two days, resulting in the birth of The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves – GACC.
For what reason has a so simple household appliance became a concern exceeding national borders? It’s the problems from cookstoves that are as serious as tragedies like poverty, hunger, diseases, or climate changes.
Women from various poor rural areas in the world usually use traditional cookstoves with fuels including coal or biomass like wood, plant residues, animal wastes,… These types of cookstoves emit into atmosphere with a mixture of toxic chemicals of 200 times over safety level during combustion of wood or solid fuels. For more than 6 hours per day, women and their children breath in and are destroyed by such atmosphere with high concentration of smoke and dust. Analysis of the World Health Organization (WHO), such smoke equals to 2 packages of smoked cigarrette each day, meaning 10 times of damage from outdoor smoke.
Despite of dangers, most of world population now must use traditional cookstoves everyday for cooking and heating. Therefore, environment impact of those cookstoves has also become a global problem.
“Improve cookstoves, save millions of lives”
According to Ms. Clinton, a cookstove will help save many people, as effective as a mosquito net or disease vaccine. Furthermore, a clean cookstove means saving of money and time for cooking fuel gathering. Women will have more opportunities to do other things everyday and men will also participating much more in cooking. Benefits of clean cookstoves do not stay in health improvement but also empower women in life.
That is why GACC was established by the United Nation Foundation (UNF) to take care of people health, improve livelihood, empower women and treat climate change with cleaner and safer household cooking interventions. More than 1,200 partners of GACC in 175 nations (including Vietnam) committed to support in finance, experts, and research funds for 100 millions of households to use clean cookstoves by 2020.
Solutions to the problem looks so simple, but we found so hard to implement. Cooking is closely connected to culture, thus it’s so complicated to design clean cookstoves. It’s essential to consider on materials, weights, and costs. Cookstove efficiency is also different from various areas. Even famous electronic names such as Philips (Dutch), Bosch-Siemens (Germany) and BP Energy Group (India)… have not been accepted by people. Good marketing can persuade people to use new cookstoves, but not ensure people to use in the long term. In 2012, advanced cookstoves were commissioned to 15,000 households in Orissa, India. The household air pollution considerably declined, but people came back to traditional cookstoves upon the gradual degradation of advanced cookstoves. The variety of places, human, demands and cultures have many times created hard cases to inventors.
Come what may, after 5 years, GACC has attained some achievements: about 20 millions of households are using clean cookstoves, though not as totally “clean” as expected.
One of the successes is from the smokeless clean cookstoves for low-income households, produced by BioLite, a partner of GACC. According to Ethan Kay, BioLite’s Market Developing Director, it’s not simply money, but inventors have not paid attention to cooking cultures in households. In majority of developing countries, wives cook but husbands control money. It’s hard to persuade husbands to buy clean cookstoves.
(Source: STINFO # 1&2/2016)