Follow the coverage on Clinton's $50m for clean cookstoves

"This could be as transformative as bednets or even vaccines."
Hillary Clinton, CGI, 21 Sept 2010.
Video.
Prospects Rise for Clean Cooking in Poor Places (New York Times)
Clinton unveils U.S. funds for clean cookstove push (Reuters)
Hillary on Fire About Clean Cookstoves (Daily Beast)
Secretary of State Clinton announces global cookstove initiative (Nature)
Hillary Clinton, cookstoves and "The Girl Effect". Watch a short film about why girls hold the key to transforming the world (Salon)
How Hillary Clinton's clean stoves will help African women (Guardian)

For more on stoves: Stoking up a cookstove revolution (Ashden Awards)
See also: Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves and Hillary Clinton calls clean cookstoves a "cross-cutting issue"
And for some Ashden award-winning stove projects, go to: TWP/AHDESA, GERES Cambodia and Aprovecho/SSM.

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SELCO gets the message across in New York

Sarah Butler-Sloss, founder director of the Ashden Awards, arrived in New York yesterday to participate in events surrounding the UN General Assembly and the Millenium Development Goals Summit. The first event Sarah attended celebrated the work of Ashden award-winner SELCO (pic). Sarah sent this short report back from last night's event in New York.

The SELCO event was excellent. SELCO is 15 years old now and is being hailed as an exemplary organisation for delivering clean energy to the poor. The event was hosted at the CitiBank Foundation offices and supported by the Lemelson Foundation, E+Co and the UN Foundation.

At the Clinton Global Initiative today, the UN Foundation is launching the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves which aims to end energy poverty by 2030. [See Clinton calls Cookstoves "a crosscutting issue".] As a senior member of the UN Foundation said, "We cannot achieve our Millenium Development Goals without providing access to modern forms of energy to the poor, it is essential for alleviating poverty."

The UN Foundation is very keen to promote the solutions - such as SELCO's - that bring clean reliable energy to the poor. The phrase 'energy access for the poor' seems to be on everyone's lips here.

One of the people at the SELCO event was the Indian Minister, Deepak Gupta, who was at our Ashden Awards conference in India, and who is in charge of India's Ministry for New and Renewable Energy (MNRE). He remembered the Ashden Awards event and was proudly telling us that next year they will electrify 500 new villages through decentralised power and renewable energies.

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AID Foundation joins Clinton Global Initative

AID Foundation International (AIDFI), who won an Ashden Award for their work with ram pumps to supply water to remote villages in the Philippines, have joined the Clinton Global Initiative:
Auke Idzenga, one of the founders of AIDFI was personally invited to attend the Clinton Global Initiatives-Asia held in Hong Kong from December 2-3, 2008.

President Clinton travelled to Hong Kong to join several hundred Asian leaders from a wide variety of backgrounds to further strengthen social and global responsibility in Asia, and move toward the benefits achieved through collaboration.

This meeting was similar in format to the Annual Meetings in New York. The meeting focused on three primary areas of discussion: education, energy & climate change, and public health. As an integral part of membership, each CGI Asia participant made a Commitment to Action—a new, specific, and measurable initiative that addresses a social, economic, or environmental problem of the member’s choosing.

The commitment made by AIDFI:

Supplying Water to the Uplands - Spreading the Technology
The Alternative Indigenous Development Inc. (AIDFI) commits to a two-year program that would establish self-sustaining ram pump manufacturing and installation capacity in Colombia, Indonesia and Madagascar, and scale-up its existing program of hydraulic ram pump installations in upland communities in the Philippines. The program seeks to address the problem of a lack of easy access to water in rural communities in these countries. Lack of water leads to poor hygiene and sanitation, and limits agricultural activities. In addition to providing access to water, the program will establish a self-sustaining manufacturing, installation and maintenance capacity in each of these countries.

This commitment program would follow the technology transfer approach that AIDFI implemented with good effect in Afghanistan. It will be rolled out sequentially across the specified countries to allow learning from each country to be incorporated in subsequent activities. In addition, to scale up its existing operations in the Philippines, AIDFI will provide training and guidance of installation teams from other provinces, hold conferences for installation teams to share their knowledge and experience between communities and monitor the work of the installation teams to maintain quality standards.

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