[Stoves] ***SPAM*** The Clean Cooking Alliance has abandoned the rural poor

[K McLean]

List, cc:

Donee Alexander (CCA)
Elisa Derby (CCA)
Bastiaan Teune
Ron Larson
Jim Jetter
John Mitchell



I had a conversation with Donee Alexander with CCA at COP27.  Here is a
summary in the email I sent Donee.



Hi Donee,

Thank you for taking the time to discuss rock beds after your SEforAll
panel discussion about clean cooking at COP27.  I am stunned by your
comments.

It has been clear for years that CCA has no interest in rock beds.  I
assumed that CCA was not sufficiently familiar with rock beds.  Since Rob
Balais was also on your panel, this seemed to be the perfect time to
discuss the important role that rock beds could play in improving wood
cookstoves during the transition to universal clean cooking.

Rob  wrote two articles about rock beds:

Low-cost interventions to reduce emissions and fuel consumption in open
wood fires in rural communities
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0973082620302775>

Low-cost interventions to reduce emissions and fuel consumption in open
wood fires in rural communities: Evidence from field surveys
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PcuLIy2Yu8ALm0IqK1LMmb8DJn0T9KWS/view?usp=sharing>


After the presentation, you, Rob and I had a discussion about rock beds.

Rob knows rock beds well so I asked him to be present to confirm my
statements.  You stated that you are familiar with rock beds.  I told you:

1. Rock beds improve fuel usage in wood cookstoves by a third.

2. Rock beds decrease smoke by more than half.

3. Rock beds are free and training in Rob's paper was about $0.03 per
adopting household, lower elsewhere.
4. Adoption rates are high.

5. Rock beds could be important during the long transition to universal
clean cooking.

Rob agreed that everything I said was accurate.

You politely made it clear that CCA is not interested in working with rock
beds or Sun24.  You made two striking statements:

1.  CCA only works with enterprises.  (Businesses that make a buck.).  It
does not work with NGOs.
2.  Enterprises only work in urban and peri-urban areas.


My conclusion is that the CCA has given up on rural families in Africa who
will probably never be the target of "enterprises".

CCA sucks in all of the air in this space, all of the funding and all of
the attention.  Without the endorsement of CCA, cooking projects struggle.
So not only is CCA ignoring rural African families, it is a barrier to
other projects that aim to help these families.

This is reprehensible.

Kevin McLean
Sun24
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20221116/68c1a71c/attachment.html>