What's Cooking? A Brief Update

Extensive world press coverage attended the speech by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on September 21, 2010 announcing the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. The Alliance, which is coordinated through theUnitedNations Foundation (UNF), is a unique and innovative combination of founding partner organizations that signed up to the goal of providing 100 million clean cookstoves by 2020. Its objective is to reduce the significant health and other impacts of current use of household biomass fuels in the world's poorest households. As of the launch, someUS$60million had been committed to the Alliance of the $250 million goal. Those that contributed at least $250,000 are indicated below by an asterisk (*) as founding funders. About 90% of the commitment came in the form of applied research funding fromUS government agencies, most prominently the National Institutes of Health*, Department of Energy*, Environmental Protection Agency*, the Department of State*, and Centers of Disease Control*. A number of UN agencies were founding partners, including WHO, UN-Energy, UNEP, WFP, UNIDO, and UNHCR; as well as the bilateral aid agencies of Germany*, Norway* and the US*. Two European technical assistance groups, GTZ* (Germany) and SNV* (Netherlands) also participated, alongwith the charitable foundations of two major companies–Shell Oil* and Morgan Stanley*–and of course UNF* itself. One of the half dozen national cookstove programs currently active was also a founding partner, that of Peru. In addition, the Alliance is inviting additional interested governments, as well as implementing organizations in the public, private, and non-profit sectors to become (non-founding) partners (http://cleancookstoves. org/the-alliance/partnership-opportunities/).