Towards an outcomes-based approach to cleaner cooking

Traditional cookstoves that burn solid fuels such as wood, charcoal and dung are used by up to 3 billion people worldwide. 

The use of solid fuels in these simple stoves produces high levels of air pollutants, and has devastating effects on individual health and the local and global environment.

A new generation of improved cookstoves has come onto the market, with the potential to significantly reduce these negative environmental, social and health outcomes. But enabling their sustained adoption has proved challenging.

In this short working paper, we identify three innovations that are critical to making progress:

• Remote sensing technologies which measure actual cookstove usage at household level

• New methodologies to monetize the social and environmental impact of these improved cookstoves

• Structuring funding on an outcomes basis to incentivise faster scale-up