18 April 2016
This program was named “Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves”. The program is supported by many partners, including governments of some nations, multilateral organizations, enterprise sponsors with donation of 10 million USD.
The cookstoves to be introduced to developing contries have two types. The first type priced at 20USD can reduce smoke emission by 50% over open ones. The other priced at 100USD can reduce smoke emission by 95% without any heat efficiency decrease. However, both are used for only 3-5 year, so they need periodical replacements.
Reid Detchon, Vice president of Energy and Climate under the United Nations Foundation – one of the Alliance’s partners, said this plan is not only simply as using sponsored money to buy millions of new cookstoves for developing countries.
The sponsor group hopes to create a contractor model so that small companies can manufacture and sell these cookstove samples to markets, according to local materials and fuels, cooking methods and food consumption models of each area. This program is aimed only at opening business opportunities for women and lessening fuel burdens on women and children around the world.
Nearly 3 billion people in developing is now still cooking with open cookstoves using straw, wood, coal and animal dung. The U.N estimates that each year these open cookstoves kills 1.9 million people, most of those are women and children, due to diseases related to hearts, lungs, or less-weight births.
Such open cookstoves have also contributed to hotter earth because millions of black carbon has been emitted into atmosphere and forests have been destroyed for fuels. Nevertheless, this issue has been ignored by many governments and private sponsoring organizations.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), indoor air pollution due to cooking methods is of the forth health threat in developing countries, right after the threats of dirty water and poor hygiene, unsafe sex and malnutrition. Fuel gathering mostly as the work of women and children has prevented millions of children from schooling.