Partnership Cooks Up New Solution to Poverty and Climate Change
New cross-sector partnership launched to tackle Indoor Air Pollution at scale in Nigeria by providing 2 million clean cookstoves.
“FORT COLLINS, Colo., Feb. 23, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Envirofit International (a global cookstoves business) and Shell Foundation (an international foundation) have joined forces with the US-based carbon finance business, C-Quest Capital, to kickstart a clean cookstoves industry in Nigeria. Clean cookstoves are the most viable solution to Indoor Air Pollution (IAP), the toxic smoke that claims one life every 16 seconds in the developing world. The partners aim to deliver two million improved cookstoves to Nigerian households over the next seven years.”
Over three billion people in the developing world cook on open fires or inefficient stoves in poorly ventilated homes. The toxic smoke that is produced causes severe lung and respiratory illness and contributes to climate change. Each year nearly two million people die from IAP. The problem is particularly rife in Nigeria – a country that has the largest household wood-burning population in Africa. However the high costs associated with developing affordable “cleaner” stoves that cut these emissions, and getting these to market in a country of Nigeria’s size, has meant that for centuries people have had no widespread solution to this problem.”