Launched in 2010, the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves is a public-private partnership hosted by the UN Foundation to save lives, improve livelihoods, empower women, and protect the environment by creating a thriving global market for clean and efficient household cooking solutions. The Alliance’s 100 by ‘20 goal calls for 100 million households to adopt clean and efficient cookstoves and fuels by 2020. In Phase 2, the Alliance will build upon its early momentum and success to ensure that its goal of 60 million households adopting cleaner and more efficient cookstoves and fuels by the end of 2017 is reached.

The Alliance works with over 1300 donor, national, implementer, service provider, and "champion" partners. The partners include governments, multilateral organizations, the private sector, NGOs, universities, researchers, and philanthropic organizations.

Actions:

• Further catalyze markets and spur adoption by designing transformational global, national, and community-based public awareness campaigns that underscore the multifaceted problem and promote sustainable behavior change.
• Continue to work to ensure a steady infusion of capital for innovation, production, distribution, and consumer financing mechanisms that enable greater purchase and adoption of clean cooking solutions by those who need them most.
• Bolster large-scale research efforts, national and international standards processes, labeling and certification of cookstoves, and enterprise and NGO capacity-building to create a thriving marketplace capable of reaching and engaging people and organizations.

The Alliance's objective is to measure progress and success whilst facilitating improvements in the sector over time. Thus, standards, testing and research all play integral roles in the Alliance’s approach to monitoring and evaluation. The Alliance is developing clear and transparent indicators that can cost-effectively measure results from the most basic project parameters (like cookstove sales, adoption rates, household air pollution and fuel savings) to broader objectives (saving lives, empowering women, improving livelihoods and protecting the environment). These efforts must be applicable to all regions and target markets as well as to the majority of cookstove and fuel distribution efforts.

Photo credit: MicroEnergy Credits (Flickr)