Clean Cooking Alliance Releases 2018 Annual Report Focusing on Investment, Innovation, and Impact

WASHINGTON, June 19, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- The Clean Cooking Alliance ("Alliance") released its Annual Report today, showcasing progress made in 2018 by the Alliance and its partners. Under the theme "Investment. Innovation. Impact," the new report highlights major milestones and trends while featuring voices from across the clean cooking sector, including an entrepreneur and manufacturer in Africa, a health worker in Nepal, and consumers in China.

"Clean cooking is freedom," said José Andrés, Alliance Global Ambassador, founder of World Central Kitchen, the chef/owner of ThinkFoodGroup, and one of the voices featured in the report. "It all adds up to one thing to me – liberation for women, for families, for children, for men, for communities, for humanity."

The report also includes the top emerging trends from the Alliance's Clean Cooking Industry Snapshot, a first-of-its-kind report analyzing investment and business model innovation in the clean cooking sector. Although investment in the sector has increased in recent years, it is still inadequate, the report shows.

To stimulate much-needed growth in investment, the Alliance co-hosted the first Clean Cooking Investment Forum in November 2018 in Kigali, Rwanda. The Investment Forum convened more than 250 people from over 40 countries to amplify efforts to identify, support, and finance businesses with the potential to greatly expand the sector.

"My first year with the Alliance has been truly inspiring," said Alliance CEO Dymphna van der Lans, who joined the organization in April 2018. "There is real excitement around the innovations emerging in the clean cooking sector, and I'm proud of the work the Alliance and its partners are doing to build an inclusive industry that makes clean cooking accessible to the three billion people who live each day without it."

Building on its work since 2010, the Alliance and its global network of partners continued to play a central role in driving investment and consumer demand for clean cooking while fostering an enabling environment for industry growth. Notable advancements include the first-ever international, standardized lab testing protocols for cookstoves, new grant funding under the Spark+ facility, and ongoing behavior change interventions that have reached 40 million people to date. Alliance research efforts continue to strengthen the investment case for clean cooking, with a new study showing that transitioning to clean cooking can have a positive impact on birth outcomes. In addition, the Alliance launched an updated name and brand to better represent its work and the evolution of the sector.

"Following nearly a decade of successes, challenges, and lessons learned, we must now look toward the future and what is needed over the next 10 years to drive our industry forward and move us toward the universal clean cooking access goal," said van der Lans.

Download the complete report here.

SOURCE Clean Cooking Alliance