World Bank Supports Program to Bring Clean Cooking to 100 Million Households

More than three billion people around the world use inefficient cookstoves and traditional biomass fuels for cooking. Over 4.3 million lives a year are lost due to household air pollution from traditional cooking. Furthermore, traditional cooking has a high economic cost for developing nations. Households spend money on poor quality fuel and use a significant amount of productive time in fuel collection. Endeavors to improve this situation have typically faced the hurdle of weak markets and distribution systems for cleaner stoves and fuels.

Now the World Bank Group has entered into a major partnership with the Global Alliance for Cookstoves, which aims to bring clean cooking to 100 million households worldwide that still use inefficient cookstoves and solid fuels for cooking. The new five-year Efficient Clean Cooking and Heating Partnership was announced recently at the Cookstoves Future Summit in New York. The partnership will support in-country programs undertaken by both the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves and the World Bank Group. It will be managed by the World Bank’s Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP).

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Image Credit: Flickr via Engineering for Change

Vikas is a staff writer for the Sustainable Development news and editorial section on Justmeans. He is an MBA with 20 years of managerial and entrepreneurial experience and global travel. He is the author of "The Power of Money" (Scholars, 2003), a book that presents a revolutionary monetary economic theory on poverty alleviation in the developing world. Vikas is also the official writer for an international social project for developing nations "Decisions for Life" run in collaboration between the ILO, the University of Amsterdam and the Indian Institute of Management.