[Stoves] Opinion pieces from Nairobi: Cookstoves to save lives and climate

[Nikhil Desai]

Fight climate change with smart funding and support for women
<https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/business/article/2001315986/fight-climate-change-with-smart-funding-and-support-for-women>,
Sarah Butler-Sloss, Standard Digital (Nairobi) 10 March 2019

Smarter funding, policies and support for women key to saving planet
<https://www.nation.co.ke/oped/opinion/Support-for-women-key-to-saving-planet/440808-5018406-13miork/>,
Sarah Butler-Sloss, Daily Nation (Nairobi) 10 March 2019

The author is the founder director of the Ashden Trust she established 30
years ago from family money.

Both pieces make a pitch for BURN's Jikokoa stove and state a case for
catalytic finance:

" The impact can be huge — $1 billion of catalytic finance would unlock the
$50 billion needed to make clean cooking and electricity available to
everyone. "

In my experience, this is plausible but the question is over what period
and at what pace.

It is tempting for lazy minds to take one case and multiply it with any
number -- that's how we got all those theories of deforestation, climate
damage, women's misery, and premature deaths. To spend money - charity
money is after all in part indirectly funded by a taxpayer - right is
damned difficult.

One example is CDM cookstove projects. Another is GACC, in particular its
misadventure with the Dutch public money and Deutsche Bank to have a fund
for cookstove manufacturers.

Errors and failures are forgivable. Even I forgive good hearts and smart
minds, howsoever rare. It is just that small-scale projects are
infuriatingly context-specific and their direct impacts on the livelihoods
of the poor impossible to characterize and measure. Each project that is
commercially viable - albeit with a mix of subsidies and concessional
finance - takes a great deal of patient hand-holding and technical support
to make it work.

I am a believer - believe it or not - in catalytic finance, expert
technical assistance, and large-scale partnerships. But local capacity is
often very weak, and global or nationwide hypes only attract undesirable
pressures to show lives saved and CO2 avoided.

One example of that is the Gold Standard theology - that charcoal stoves
are not eligible for voluntary carbon finance.

With friends like those, who needs enemies?

Nikhil


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Nikhil Desai
(US +1) 202 568 5831
*Skype: nikhildesai888*
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