Center for Entrepreneurship in International Health and Development (CEIHD)
Technology and Markets :
Fostering an Entrepreneurial Approach
Improving Health and Well-Being
Fostering an Entrepreneurial Approach
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 new healthful technologies.
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 a network of partnerships that support local 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 providing financing to both producers and consumers.
<<backApproximately half of the world’s families use wood, dung, and other biomass fuels to cook an enormous range of foods using a variety of techniques. Therefore, CEIHD promotes cookstove designs 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 or solar energy to deliver cleaner energy. CEIHD supports all these approaches, and performs the valuable function of assessing the relative merits of different stove technologies and projecting the health effects for specific populations.
For additional information on cutting-edge household energy technologies, please see these links: The Solar Cooking Archive and Biomass Cooking Stoves.
Improving Health and Well-Being
The good news is that a combination of appropriate technology and smart infrastructure development can significantly alleviate health problems and improve living standards.
>>The sustained use of improved household stoves and cleaner-burning fuels has a measurable effect in reducing this burden of disease. Recent research in Kenya (Ezzati & Kammen 2001) demonstrated a 24-64% decrease in the incidence of ARI in children under five as a result of changes in stove, fuel and/or cooking location. For more information, see: article from The Lancet on health research in Kenya.
>> In addition to the health benefits, improvements in household energy are likely to have socio-economic impacts. More energy-efficient stoves reduce a family’s expenditures of time or money on fuel, freeing up resources for other goals. For additional information on the link between poverty and household energy, please see the website of theIntermediate Technology Development Group.
copyright CEIHD - UC Berkeley School of Public Health, 2003
questions and comments welcome: lspautz@berkeley.edu
