We published last month an interview with Dennis Tessier of ARTI-TZ, a Tanzania-based non-profit working to promote the manufacturing and marketing of briquettes made from the char produced in improved charcoal kilns. According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the Tanzania’s forests are disappearing at a whopping rate of 4,200 square kilometers (1,620 sq. miles) annually. That’s about four times the size of New York City or half the size of Virunga National Park in the DRC. In our Q&A with Dennis he mentioned ARTI-Tanzania’s Waste to Wealth (W2W) project and we wanted to find out more. Below Continue reading
How-to
Why the market alone cannot solve the clean cookstove gap
Can it be that the emphasis on finding market-based solutions to energy poverty alleviation and the large-scale deployment of improved cookstoves is just not practical? “Probably,” say a group of researchers investigating the pressures placed on grass-roots NGOs to adopt market-based approaches to solving household energy and health issues in the developing world.
Peace Corps launches site providing resources for improved cookstoves and ovens
This post comes to us via the good people at the IAP (Indoor Air Pollution Updates). We thought it might be of interest to our visitors as a resource.
Peace Corps – Improved Stoves and Ovens – Welcome to the Peace Corps Clean Indoor Air/ Improved Cooking Toolkit, your one-stop source for reliable and relevant information about improved cookstoves, ovens and biogas applications appropriate for Volunteer communities.
Compilation of Energy-Efficient Cookstove videos on YouTube (via IAP Updates/USAID)
We are pleased to share with you this list of 25 cookstove-related videos posted on YouTube and curated by the good people over at USAID’s Indoor Air Pollution News Update.
Thanks IAP Update for doing this!
A Man, a Stove, a Mission
Nathaniel Mulcahy’s speaks with the urgency and precision of someone on a mission and with little time.
Although he has patiently and politely dedicated the better part of an hour to our conversation, I know that the moment he hangs up he will be off to complete a million tasks on his to-do list.
Mulcahy has good reasons to be in a hurry. The first one is that he cheated death seven years ago following a really bad accident, so he’s a man on his second chance.
The second reason, which is linked to the first, is that he is determined to bring energy-efficient cookstoves to the world’s 2.4 billion people who sit at the bottom of the world’s energy ladder. They are the poorest of the poor who lack access to modern fuels and must make do with wood, charcoal, and animal dung to meet their everyday energy needs.