Approximately half of the world’s families use wood, dung, and other biomass fuels as well as coal to cook an enormous range of foods using a variety of techniques. The resulting indoor air pollution is directly responsible for mortality and morbidity in millions of people worldwide. It is one of the developing world’s sad ironies that the act of preparing food, designed to nurture a family, instead often puts its health and well-being at risk. CEIHD promotes innovative cookstoves and fuels adapted to local conditions that deliver health and efficiency benefits. Some stoves offer a cleaner and more efficient way to burn traditional solid fuels, while others use petroleum products, biogas, or solar energy to deliver cleaner energy. CEIHD supports all these approaches, and works to create profitable sustainable businesses that deliver an attractive product to the customer.

History has shown that technology alone cannot solve human problems. This is particularly true for household energy interventions, where lasting improvements in health may require people to alter time-honored cooking habits. CEIHD believes that commercial markets are an effective and efficient way to spread improved cooking technologies, with both product marketing and social marketing playing important roles in this process.

Our goal is to improve availability of and access to improved household energy technologies though a series of successful pilot projects. Over the long term, we believe these will form the backbone of a template that can be adapted to many types of communities and scaled up to have lasting results on a global scale.

Our approach is to develop partnerships with a network of stove enterprises so they can deliver popular stoves at an affordable price. Our activities include identifying and developing markets, training local entrepreneurs, troubleshooting manufacturing and distribution problems, and accessing financing for both producers and consumers.