The Charcoal Project

How Charcoal Fuels Irregular Armed Groups

President Barack Obama announced Friday (July 2oth) that the US was banning the sale of charcoal from Somalia to third countries. The effort is intended to deprive the Somali-based, Al-Quaeda affiliate, Al-Shabaab, from important revenue collected from the export of Somali charcoal to countries in the Gulf region.

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VIDEOS: Can Clean Cookstoves and Energy Poverty go viral

To support this goal, the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves came out a few weeks ago with several videos that have been in the making for some time now. (The first four videos on the Alliance’s YouTube channel are the ones in question. And, yes, Julia Roberts does appear in most of them!)

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Joint UNIDO and Kenya biomass project to begin in June

Kenya and UNIDO launch 5-year biomass project. This is welcome news considering that over 68 percent of the population in Kenya use biomass for cooking, whilst Kenya’s Ministry of Energy estimates that up to 95 percent of the energy consumed in rural areas is in the form of fuel wood, agricultural residue and animal waste.

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