One afternoon in the early 1990s, a group of pupils at the primary school I attended performed a drama about the Tsotso (twigs) stove (an improved biomass cookstove) to raise awareness about clean cooking. The message was simple: the open fires or simple metal stoves used for cooking in our villages were harmful and contributing …
Tag: clean cooking
Advancing Poverty Eradication: Reflections and My Priorities for 2026
Fieldwork in Southeast Asia, 2016: Engaging with lived experiences A world free of poverty remains a distant aspiration, since we are off track to meet the “No Poverty” target by 2030. Does that mean, then, that we are losing the war on poverty? Certainly not. Ending poverty within our lifetime remains possible, as I shared …
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Poverty’s Stubborn Persistence, Clean Cooking and Climate Change: The 2025 Global Poverty Wake-Up Call that No One Can Afford to Ignore
Global poverty remains stubbornly persistent. The just-released 2025 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) report delivers a hard truth: the world is losing the war on poverty. In previous years, as I blogged earlier here, the number of people living in acute multidimensional poverty has hovered above 1 billion, and nothing much has changed today: 1.1 …
Can African countries make 2024 a turning point in improving access to clean cooking?
Photo credit: International Energy Agency Next week, on 14 May 2024, the International Energy Agency (IEA) will convene a Summit on Clean Cooking in Africa at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. This summit will be attended by government officials, most of them from Africa, and invitees from private companies, international organisations and civil society. The …
Is it too late to achieve UNIVERSAL ACCESS TO CLEAN COOKING by 2030?
As Bill Gates Notes reported here, it is unlikely that the world will achieve any of the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. This is cause for concern as we strive towards a better world post-2030. A few days after the Bill Gates Notes forecast, the World Bank and Partners released the 2023 Tracking SDG7: The …
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Can access to clean cooking contribute to poverty eradication?
Lack of access to clean cooking (cleaner fuels and efficient cookstoves) is one of humanity's greatest challenges today. The World Bank reports that 4 billion people worldwide have no access to clean cooking services. This situation is particularly dire in rural areas, where most households use unclean fuels and inefficient cookstoves. In Zimbabwe and Malawi, …
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Blessing Gweshengwe PhD 