UN Women calls for clean cooking solutions for women at Cookstoves Future Summit

Date: Thursday, 20 November 2014

At the Cookstoves Future Summit in New York from 20-21 November, UN Women is calling on Governments, multilateral agencies and civil society organizations to commit to advancing gender equality by improving women’s access to clean cooking solutions.

Hosted by the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, the meeting, called “Fueling Markets, Catalyzing Action, Changing Lives,” will gather more than 65 Ministers, CEOs and Executive Directors from the international community to discuss ways to reduce deaths, illness and environmental degradation through the implementation of clean cooking solutions. Participants will make financial, policy and programmatic commitments, which they will announce during the event.

The summit aims to advance gender equality and improve the health of women living in poverty, who are disproportionately burdened with poor health and unpaid care work in the absence of goods and services such as clean cookstoves. According to UN Women’s 2014 World Survey on the Role of Women in Development, women take on the majority of care work and cooking in their households, putting women and their children at greater risk of exposure to harmful smoke emitted from biomass-burning cookstoves.

UN Women has a three-pronged policy commitment to clean cookstoves: promoting investment in clean cookstoves for gender-equitable sustainable development; developing gender-equitable targets and sex- and age-disaggregated indicators related to clean cookstoves; and incorporating clean cookstoves in the Beijing+20 commemoration.

UN Women’s World Survey highlights the need to invest in efficient solid-fuel stoves or cooking technologies that use cleaner fuels, especially in rural and peri-urban areas, and to involve women in stove design, testing and social marketing. The Cookstoves Future Summit will also further efforts to address the harmful effects of household air pollution, and mobilize resources to do so.