Cookstove 2013 Ashden Award Winners and Runners-up

July 1, 2013 · 2 comments

2013 Ashden Award Winners | Source: Ashden, June 2013

“The Ashden Awards bring to light ground-breaking green energy champions in the UK and developing world and inspire others to follow. From an enterprise bringing clean stoves to rural Africa to a Cornish school embracing energy-saving across its learning and practice, our winners are passionate about bringing change to their communities and the planet. At the heart of the Ashden Awards is a rigorous judging process culminating in a prestigious ceremony in London where prizes are presented to winners from all corners of the globe to help further their work.”

Below are Ashden award winning and runner-up cookstove initiatives and and a complete list of winners is at the link above:

SolarAid – International Gold Award | Creative distribution brings solar power to East Africa’s rural poor

With the audacious goal of eliminating the kerosene lamp from Africa by 2020, Solar Aid’s sales teams work with schools in rural areas to promote good quality, affordable lights to families. With over 400,000 lamps sold since 2010, the organisation is now the largest distributer of solar lights in Africa.

The immediate benefits are immeasurable: children are able to study in the evening, polluting and dangerous kerosene is avoided, and families save money. And by using competitive procurement, SolarAid is helping raise standards across the industry.

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Impact Carbon – Citi Ashden Award for Financial Innovation | Catalysing the growth of the East African stove market

Across the developing world, small businesses are selling life-saving technologies like cleaner cookstoves that reduce indoor air pollution. Many of them need help to achieve their potential. Impact Carbon works with stove and water filter enterprises across East Africa, China and elsewhere to access carbon finance, then uses the money to work intensely with them to help them build their businesses and help make the stoves more affordable for the people who want to buy them.

A shop in Goma selling fuel-efficient stoves

Uganda is Impact Carbon’s biggest market, where the five stove businesses it works with have dramatically increased sales and capacity: for example, the country’s biggest stove manufacturer has increased sales from 200 a month in 2007 to more than 10,000 a month in 2013.

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WWF – DRC – Waterloo Foundation Ashden Award for Avoided Deforestation | Grass-roots cookstoves project protects forests and helps families

Rapid deforestation in the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo is threatening its fragile ecosystem and over half the world’s population of highly endangered mountain gorillas. Meanwhile, for Goma’s burgeoning population, spending a high proportion of their income on illegally plundered charcoal makes climbing out of poverty an impossible dream.

WWF is training local businesses to build and sell cheap, culturally appropriate stoves that halve the amount of charcoal needed, so helping protect the sensitive forest environment. It’s also helping landowners start sustainable tree plantations for charcoal, to help meet Goma’s needs. So far 45,000 stoves have been sold.

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Runners-up

Cookswell Jikos – A ‘seed to ash’ approach to cleaner cookstoves

The late Dr Maxwell Kinyanjui was a pioneer in improving the sustainability of charcoal in Kenya, developing the charcoal-saving Kenya Ceramic Jiko and other technologies, and promoting commercial reforestation and efficient charcoal production. As such, the Kenyan business is unique in its ‘seed to ash’ approach to cookstoves which takes into account the entire lifecycle of wood.

Dr Kinyanjui’s family continue to take his ideas forward. While startup business Cookswell Jikos sells jikos, charcoal ovens, and small charcoal kilns,its partner the Woodlands Trust is responsible for developing new plantations.

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MicroEnergy Credits – Helping microfinance providers finance clean energy products

Lack of finance can be a major stumbling block for people in developing countries who want to buy renewable energy products, with even the cheapest solar lanterns out of reach for many. The US business MicroEnergy Credits (MEC) is a business that helps microfinance institutions promote and provide loans for these products. As well as supporting microfinance lenders to put their programmes in place it helps them access carbon finance.

So far MEC has supported microfinance providers to sell more than 180,000 renewable energy products, including stoves and solar homes systems. Its largest programme is with XacBank in Mongolia.

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SolSource – Cooking up innovation

July 1, 2013 · 0 comments

SolSource – Cooking up innovation | Source: Technology.org, June 25, 2013

An MIT alumnus brings solar-powered cookers to the people of the Himalayan plateau, helping end their dependency on biomass fuels.

While Scot Frank ’08 was interning in China as part of the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) program in 2005, he visited the rural Himalayan plateau — which opened his eyes to an energy crisis.

There, he learned, people cook and heat their homes using biomass fuels — namely, wood and yak dung. These fuels expel a climate-changing agent called black carbon and contribute to deadly indoor pollution, among other side effects.

Now Frank’s startup, One Earth Designs — which has its roots at MIT — is helping end the Himalayan plateau’s dependency on biomass fuels by providing its people with solar-powered cooking devices.

The SolSource S2 solar cooker. Credit: ONE EARTH DESIGNS

Released in December after years of tweaking, One Earth’s first cooker, dubbed SolSource, is already being used by roughly 4,000 people in the Himalayas. More than 2,000 additional orders have been placed across the world, says Frank, now the CEO of One Earth.

Data suggest that the cooker — a device that resembles a satellite dish, harnessing the sun to cook food or boil water in minutes — has reduced the use of biomass fuel on the plateau by 70 percent, Frank says. Since nearly half the world’s population uses biomass fuels, “this technology could really reach all corners of the globe,” Frank says.

Frank, whose undergraduate degree is in electrical engineering and computer science, attributes part of his success to MIT, where he found the intellectual capital and entrepreneurship resources to develop his prototype and co-found One Earth. “The MIT network and ecosystem has enabled this whole process in going from idea to product,” Frank says.

The rest of the credit goes to his One Earth team — including co-founder and chief operating officer Catlin Powers and several MIT alumni — who remained engaged throughout years of rigorous field-testing and roadblocks. “At any point in time we could have given up, but we’ve kept going, so that’s why we’re here today,” Frank says.

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Cooking fuels and prevalence of asthma

June 25, 2013 · 0 comments

Cooking fuels and prevalence of asthma: a global analysis of phase three of the International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood (ISAAC). The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, Early Online Publication, 31 May 2013.

Prof Gary WK Wong, et al.

Background – Indoor air pollution from a range of household cooking fuels has been implicated in the development and exacerbation of respiratory diseases. In both rich and poor countries, the effects of cooking fuels on asthma and allergies in childhood are unclear. We investigated the association between asthma and the use of a range of cooking fuels around the world.

Methods – For phase three of the International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood (ISAAC), written questionnaires were self-completed at school by secondary school students aged 13—14 years, 244 734 (78%) of whom were then shown a video questionnaire on wheezing symptoms. Parents of children aged 6—7 years completed the written questionnaire at home. We investigated the association between types of cooking fuels and symptoms of asthma using logistic regression. Adjustments were made for sex, region of the world, language, gross national income, maternal education, parental smoking, and six other subject-specific covariates. The ISAAC study is now closed, but researchers can continue to use the instruments for further research.

Findings – Data were collected between 1999 and 2004. 512 707 primary and secondary school children from 108 centres in 47 countries were included in the analysis. The use of an open fire for cooking was associated with an increased risk of symptoms of asthma and reported asthma in both children aged 6—7 years (odds ratio [OR] for wheeze in the past year, 1·78, 95% CI 1·51—2·10) and those aged 13—14 years (OR 1·20, 95% CI 1·06—1·37). In the final multivariate analyses, ORs for wheeze in the past year and the use of solely an open fire for cooking were 2·17 (95% CI 1·64—2·87) for children aged 6—7 years and 1·35 (1·11—1·64) for children aged 13—14 years. Odds ratios for wheeze in the past year and the use of open fire in combination with other fuels for cooking were 1·51 (1·25—1·81 for children aged 6—7 years and 1·35 (1·15—1·58) for those aged 13—14 years. In both age groups, we detected no evidence of an association between the use of gas as a cooking fuel and either asthma symptoms or asthma diagnosis.

Interpretation – The use of open fires for cooking is associated with an increased risk of symptoms of asthma and of asthma diagnosis in children. Because a large percentage of the world population uses open fires for cooking, this method of cooking might be an important modifiable risk factor if the association is proven to be causal.

Monitoring and Evaluation of the Jiko Poa Cookstove in Kenya

June 25, 2013 · 0 comments

Monitoring and Evaluation of the Jiko Poa Cookstove in Kenya, 2012.

Simone Brant, David Pennise, Dana Charron, Erin Milner, Jacob Kithinji (University of Nairobi)

Berkeley Air Monitoring Group, WASHplus

The Jiko Poa is a locally manufactured rocket-type biomass cookstove being distributed in Kenya by the Paradigm Project. The aim of this study was to provide a performance assessment for the Jiko Poa in Kenyan homes by analyzing its effects on household air pollution and fuel use, and by collecting qualitative and quantitative data on how the households valued and used it.

The study employed a ‘before after’ design: initial baseline measurements and surveys were conducted in the homes, after which the Jiko Poa was introduced and a second round of measurements and surveys were carried out about two weeks later. The air pollution and fuel use indicators as well as qualitative metrics of usage and preferences were measured over the two 24-hour periods only. Quantitative measures of usage from temperature sensors were collected continuously over a longer time horizon for all the cooking devices in the home, starting after the introduction of the new stove and continuing in a subset of homes for 10 weeks.

Use of Biochar for Soil Health Enhancement and Greenhouse Gas Mitigation in India

June 25, 2013 · 0 comments

Use of Biochar for Soil Health Enhancement and Greenhouse Gas Mitigation in India, 2013.

Ch. Srinivasarao, et al.

More than two billion people in developing world still cook and heat their homes with primitive stoves or open fires by burning wood, straw, dung, or coal. These inefficient technologies cause air pollution that can harm respiratory and cardiac health, and exacerbate global warming. New stove technologies can produce both heat for cooking and biochar for carbon sequestration and soil building. Limited testing indicates that these stoves are much more efficient and emit less gas.

The modern Anila stove was developed by U.N. Ravikumar, an environmentalist and engineer with the Centre for Appropriate Rural Technology (CART) at India’s National Institute of Engineering. The key aims of the design are to reduce the indoor air pollution that results from cooking and to take advantage of the abundance of bio-residues found in rural areas in developing countries.

June 26 EPA/Winrock Webinar – Innovative Approaches to Cookstove Consumer Finance

June 20, 2013 · 0 comments

The challenge: How to make high-quality cookstoves more affordable and accessible to those who need them most.

While there is no one-size-fits-all solution for achieving this goal, many organizations have developed their own innovative approaches to consumer finance that help get improved cookstoves into the hands of low-income and difficult-to-reach populations.

Join the Winrock and U.S. EPA “Innovative Approaches to Cookstove Consumer Finance” webinar onWednesday, June 26, 2013 at 11:00am Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) to hear a few of these approaches that can be adapted to other local contexts to increase access to financing for cookstove consumers in your target region. 

Andrée Sosler from Potential Energy, Suraj Ologburo from Toyola Energy Limited and Sylvain Romieu from UpEnergy will share their experience with developing consumer financing strategies in Sudan, Ghana and Uganda. Their strategies include:

  • Setting up revolving loan facilities to offer consumers installment payment plan options;
  • Providing consumers with trial periods, as well as a way to track and use their money saved from decreased fuel purchase to pay for the stove at the end of the trial;
  • Working with existing local rural financial institutions to provide stoves and payment facilities to rural consumers who cannot make upfront stove payments; and
  • Reducing the overall stove costs through local stove assembly and use of existing rural networks.

Webinar participation is free. For the web portion, a high-speed internet connection is required. A dedicated phone line is required to listen to audio (the web portion does not include audio capacity). Additional log-in and call-in information will be provided upon registration.

Register today for the June 26 Webinar

Date: Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Time: 15:00 – 16:30 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)/Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), which is 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (EDT).

About the speakers:

Andrée Sosler is the Executive Director of Potential Energy. Ms. Sosler previously worked with the consulting firm OTF Group, leading OTF’s projects in Republic of Congo and Angola, and she has also managed projects in Sudan, Benin, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia and Uganda. She earned an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and an AB in Development Studies from Brown University.

Suraj Wahab Ologburo is the founder and CEO of Toyola Energy Limited which is a social entrepreneurial business that produces and sells energy efficient cookstoves and solar energy products in the West African sub-region. With production and training centers in Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria, the business has sold over 300,000 cookstoves since 2007.

Sylvain Romieu is the Global Innovation Manager at UpEnergy, leading their marketing, sales, and technology innovation efforts with a focus on creating new markets and value networks. Before joining UpEnergy, Sylvain piloted the Growing Sustainable Business Initiative for UNDP in Senegal, developed sales and marketing for Grameen Danone social business project in Bangladesh, and developed and managed the Milky Start social business project for Danone in Poland. Sylvain holds post-graduate degrees in International Business from Universite Paris Est and in Sustainable Development Management from HEC Paris Business School.

For more information on this webinar, please contact:moderator@cookstovesandindoorair.org.

 

3 Alliance Grants – Cookstoves and Child Survival

June 19, 2013 · 0 comments

RFA 12-1: COOKSTOVES AND CHILD SURVIVAL | Source: Alliance website, June 16, 2013 |

A total of 20 applications were received in response to RFA 12-1. The Alliance’s External Review Panel, which included clinicians, epidemiologists, public health practitioners, and experts in exposure assessment, reviewed and ranked these applications. The Alliance has awarded grants to the three highest ranked applicants.

GRANT 1 – MOLECULAR METHODS FOR ETIOLOGIES OF PNEUMONIA IN THE GHANA BIOMASS STOVE STUDY
Principal Investigator: Dr. Darby Jack

Institution: The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York

We will investigate the potential relationship between household air pollution and respiratory tract infection in a cluster-randomized controlled cookstove environment in Ghana through pursuit of two objectives. First we will add standardized physician diagnosis of all pneumonia and severe pneumonia to our current primary outcome (fieldworker assessed probable pneumonia). Second, we will use MassTag PCR, a state-of-the-art multiplex molecular tool for pathogen identification developed by researchers at Columbia University, to determine respiratory pathogens responsible for pneumonia infections in a sample of physican diagnosed severe pneumonia cases. The proposed work will enhance the scientific relevance of the parent study, and will shed new light on which respiratory pathogens are most responsive to household energy interventions. It may also implicate specific pathogens that can be addressed through use of vaccines or other interventions. The proposal has been developed through collaboration between the Kintampo Health Research Centre in Ghana, the Center for Infection and Immunity, and the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia University.

GRANT 2 – NEPAL COOKSTOVE INTERVENTION TRIAL
Principal Investigator: Dr. James Tielsch

Institution: Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Acute lower respiratory infections remain the leading cause of death among children under 5 in the world. The observational epidemiologic data strongly support an association of open burning of biomass fuel sources in the home and ALRI. As a result of strong international interest in programs for reducing indoor air pollution there is a need for randomized trials to generate data on the potential health impacts. The Nepal Cookstove Replacement Trial is a large, cluster-randomized, step-wedge designed trial to assess the impact of replacing traditional open burning stoves with an “improved” stove on the incidence of ALRI and adverse reproductive outcomes in a rural population in southern Nepal.

Enrollment and follow-up of over 3600 households will be completed by the summer of 2012, but the “improved” stove used in this project (Envirofit G3355 with chimney) only reduces PM concentrations by approximately 50-70%. Despite this reduction, the exposure concentrations remain much higher than current WHO and EPA indoor air standards. Data from observational studies of outdoor PM concentrations and chronic disease outcomes suggest that the shape of the dose-response function can vary significantly by the disease of concern.

Very few data exist to estimate the dose-response function for ALRI in low-income countries. As a result, it is unclear how well in terms of PM reduction improved stoves need to perform in order to see important reductions in risk of ALRI. Results of our main step-wedge trial are not yet available, but it is clear that a point of higher PM reduction on the dose-response curve will provide important information for stove designers and program managers in estimating the magnitude of health effects that can be attributed to stove intervention programs.

This application proposes an extension to the current trial by appending a randomized trial comparing the Envirofit stove to a LPG stove on ALRI incidence in young children. A total of 1600 of the households in the current trial who have children.

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Josh Kearns – The Ecological Footprint of CO2 Emissions

June 19, 2013 · 0 comments

This article is from Josh Kearns of Aqueous Solutions.

I have been playing around with a concept that might be useful to help evaluate humanitarian engineering/community development project environmental sustainability.

Most of us in the international humanitarian engineering/sustainable community development sector are professionally concerned with environmental sustainability. But most of us, myself included, do a lot of long-haul air travel for fieldwork, incurring substantial CO2 emissions. I’ve often wondered that if, in many cases, the good we do advancing sustainability in our fieldwork gets negated by the CO2 we emit getting there and back again.

I used to work as a researcher in the development of the Ecological Footprint, a sustainability accounting tool. From this I know that people in the “developing world” have much smaller Ecological Footprints than we do in the US.
So I wondered, how long would a humanitarian scientist or engineer from the US have to live at a local, developing community Ecological Footprint level in order to offset the CO2 they emitted getting out into the field?

I call this concept the “BEEF,” for “Break Even Ecological Footprint,” measured in units of time (e.g. months). The BEEF concept could be applied to international “sustainable development” and “humanitarian engineering” efforts as a metric to gauge net environmental benefit of a particular work/study trip.

The BEEF would be the minimum amount of time a scientist or engineer would have to remain in-country/community in order to have a net sustainability benefit. Any trip shorter than the BEEF would be futile from a sustainability perspective as the environmental costs of getting their would outweigh the sustainability benefits of living at a lower Ecological Footprint level relative to the US lifestyle.

Most of my fieldwork is in SE Asia (Thailand mainly). So using Ecological Footprint analysis, I calculated a BEEF for myself of 2.2-11.7 months. That’s a wide range, because it takes into account a couple of scenarios depending

  • upon how closely I approximate an average Thai lifestyle, and
  • whether a radiative forcing multiplier is used for CO2 emissions at high altitude.
“A more detailed description of the BEEF methodology, along with a few additional sample calculations is presented here (http://www.aqsolutions.org/?page_id=1114). Additionally, Marc Hassan has built a simple and convenient online BEEF calculator (http://mjh.bugs3.com/BEEF.php).”

One major take-home message, however, is that short trips (i.e. less than a month), particularly to far-flung destinations, are almost certainly futile from an environmental sustainability perspective. That’s an implication that should cause some concern, and hopefully stimulate contemplation and conversation about sustainability in the sector.

Indoor particulate matter in developing countries: a case study in Pakistan

June 18, 2013 · 0 comments

Indoor particulate matter in developing countries: a case study in Pakistan and potential intervention strategies. Environ. Res. Lett. 8 (2013) 024002.

Zaheer Ahmad Nasir, et al.

Around three billion people, largely in low and middle income countries, rely on biomass fuels for their household energy needs. The combustion of these fuels generates a range of hazardous indoor air pollutants and is an important cause of morbidity and mortality in developing countries. Worldwide, it is responsible for four million deaths. A reduction in indoor smoke can have a significant impact on lives and can help achieve many of the Millennium Developments Goals.

This letter presents details of a seasonal variation in particulate matter (PM)concentrations in kitchens using biomass fuels as a result of relocating the cooking space. During the summer, kitchens were moved outdoors and as a result the 24 h average PM10, PM2:5 and PM1 fell by 35%, 22% and 24% respectively. However, background concentrations of PM10 within the village increased by 62%. In locations where natural gas was the dominant fuel, the PM concentrations within the kitchen as well as outdoors were considerably lower than those in locations using biomass. These results highlights the importance of ventilation and fuel type for PM levels and suggest that an improved design of cooking spaces would result in enhanced indoor air quality

Looking at New Tools to Assess Development and Measure Exposure

June 18, 2013 · 0 comments

Assessing Pollution’s Effects on Infant Development | Source: Diana Austin, June 2013 |

Household air pollution (HAP) from cooking fires is a killer, causing 3.5 million deaths worldwide in 2010, including 300,000 deaths among children under 1 year of age, according to a study published in December 2012 in The Lancet.

UCSF School of Nursing faculty member Lisa Thompson knows these dangers well. As a co-investigator on the landmark RESPIRE (Randomized Exposure Study of Pollution Indoors and Respiratory Effects) study, she examined the links between exposure to HAP and acute respiratory infections in rural Guatemalan children.

Lisa Thompson

She observed that infants born to mothers who had received a plancha – a special woodstove with improved ventilation – during the prenatal period had higher birthweights than those whose mothers used traditional open-fire stoves. To build on that research, Thompson, who has spent a decade investigating the effects of air pollution on babies and young children, is conducting a pilot study to test methods to examine the effects of HAP on infants’ and young children’s neurodevelopment.

“The study builds on the infrastructure that’s been there for 10 years, so we have the same location, we have the same people working for us, and we’re enrolling participants in the same communities,” says Thompson. Titled NACER (Newborns and Children Exposed to Respiratory Pollutants), after the Spanish word for “to be born,” the study is following 36 pregnant women and their infants from 16 weeks’ gestation through one year after birth, measuring both pre- and postnatal exposure to pollutants and assessing infants’ growth and neurodevelopment.

Looking at New Tools to Assess Development and Measure Exposure

As part of the study, Thompson is using a new comprehensive assessment procedure that specially trained fieldworkers can use to make a rapid assessment of infant neurodevelopment. Pediatric neurologist Naila Zaman Khan, head of the Department of Pediatric Neuroscience at Dhaka Shishu (Children’s) Hospital and academic director of Bangladesh Institute of Child Health, developed the instrument – which doesn’t require assessors to have special expertise in child development – for use in low-resource settings.

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