Three billion people across the globe still cook with wood, charcoal, and other biomass fuels, and most do so over an open fire. This seriously harms the health of families and contributes to deforestation, air pollution, and climate change. Cleaner cookstoves are designed to use biomass or liquefied petroleum gas more efficiently, making them safer and more affordable and efficient than traditional stoves.
The Osprey Foundation supports early-stage, market-based approaches that advance the wide-scale use of cleaner cooking solutions in underserved communities, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where most of the population still uses traditional cooking methods. We believe that the market is the best way to deliver sustainable cleaner cooking solutions at a large scale, and we back a range of innovative ventures, such as business models that focus on providing fuel for cleaner cooking and improved stove designs. To succeed, these solutions must be responsive and sensitive to household and community needs and appropriate to local cultures. We also fund research and analysis that will encourage stronger uptake of cleaner cooking solutions.
Clean Impact Bond: Mobilizing Finance for Clean Cooking
This May 2023 report describes a trailblazing transaction that expands the sale of clean cookstoves in Kenya through payments for health and gender benefits generated when the stoves are used. Osprey participated in this transaction, dubbed the Clean Impact Bond (CIB), to demonstrate that it’s feasible to pay for these types of benefits just as one would pay for carbon credits. Our goal is to catalyze the establishment and expansion of markets for these previously unmonetized benefits, hence accelerating the adoption of cleaner cooking methods and other products and services with health and gender benefits for the poor. The report presents the structure of this result-based financing instrument, the context for the CIB, and evidence that clean cooking can achieve measurable health and gender benefits. It also summarizes key lessons from structuring the CIB. The findings are primarily intended for organizations that could participate in similar, larger transactions in the future, including official aid agencies, development finance institutions, impact investors, and foundations. The report was produced by International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group, which participated in the CIB along with Cardano Development, BIX Capital, Sistema.bio, and the Osprey Foundation.
Giving Credit: Strengths and Weaknesses in Carbon Credit Markets and Opportunities for Philanthropic Investors
This June 2023 report provides an overview of the current state of, and outlook for, the voluntary carbon credit market in order to orient potential philanthropic investors to both the opportunities and the risks in carbon finance. Carbon credit markets have advanced significantly over the past several years, creating compelling new investment opportunities for philanthropists who care about making our society more sustainable by reducing emissions. As this report details, carbon credits can be an effective way for investors of all kinds to help ensure these projects receive the funding they need. However, these markets are still working to overcome several obstacles, including the need for stronger quality control as well as greater standardization, transparency, and clarity into the governing rules and regulations. There are several strategies that savvy philanthropic investors can employ, whether they’re new to the market or seeking to increase their engagement: focusing on projects with meaningful and verifiable socioeconomic and health outcomes; seeking to support market infrastructure; and avoiding projects that the broader market may view as favorable but may not deliver optimal benefits. The report was commissioned by the Osprey Foundation, which has participated in the voluntary carbon market, and produced by Arabella Advisors with input from experts in the field.
Our Partners In Action: Clean Cooking Alliance
The Clean Cooking Alliance (CCA) works to strengthen the clean-cooking industry by working with partners in dozens of countries to scale various technologies and business models that make clean cooking more accessible. The alliance seeks to boost consumer demand for clean cookstoves and fuel sources; mobilize investment to build a strong pipeline of scalable businesses to deliver those products; and create enabling conditions for industry growth through policy advocacy, research, and convenings. The alliance engages deeply with eight priority countries—Bangladesh, China, Ghana, India, Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda—which are testing grounds for best practices and tools that the organization then shares with its global partner network. The Osprey Foundation supports the Clean Cooking Alliance in its pursuit to catalyze the scale of clean cooking ventures and the adoption of market-based solutions, and to spur consumer demand.
Cooking Industry Catalyst
With support from the Osprey Foundation and other donors, in 2020 CCA launched the Cooking Industry Catalyst (CIC), a global, industry-development program which builds demand for clean cooking solutions, supports scalable business models, and demonstrates their viability to the field. The CIC seeks to strengthen the clean cooking ecosystem by implementing a variety of programs that approach the problem from different angles. The initiative has three components: Venture Catalyst, Demand Catalyst, and Market Catalyst.
The Venture Catalyst (VC) program provides targeted, specialized support to vetted, high-potential clean cooking businesses to help them become more commercially viable and investment-ready. It also helps these enterprises access growth capital. The Market Catalyst program takes a more holistic, field-level approach by seeking to create an enabling environment for clean cooking businesses to grow. Interventions include addressing common obstacles that these businesses face, such as limited access to finance, markets, or innovation opportunities, as well as equipping various stakeholders to better understand the industry and more effectively promote its growth.
Finally, the Demand Catalyst addresses the consumer side: it seeks to increase demand for clean cooking products by driving shifts in behavior, cooking practices, and purchasing decisions. Activities include running campaigns to raise awareness of the health risks of conventional cooking practices and the benefits of clean cooking, as well as providing technical assistance to businesses to help them strengthen their marketing efforts.
User Insights Lab
To rapidly and significantly increase global adoption of cleaner cooking solutions, these products and services must be more effective at meeting users’ real needs and aligning with their day-to-day lives. The User Insights Lab (UIL) seeks to fill this gap by harnessing the power of human-centered design to generate valuable insights about users’ tastes and experiences and to then share this knowledge with enterprises, governments, donors, and policymakers—enabling them to create better products, policies, and programs across the clean cooking field. In addition to developing these data and insights, the UIL will help others access and learn how to incorporate them into their work, shifting mindsets across the clean cooking field toward prioritizing the user and placing their needs at the center of decisions that affect them. The Osprey Foundation has supported the UIL during its startup phase, providing the needed capital for it to get up and running on projects such as designing and distributing new consumer financing or payment mechanisms, supporting the private sector to create more effective marketing campaigns, and increasing support for government subsidy programs.
what we are reading: CCA’s 2023 Clean Cooking Industry Snapshot
Now in its fourth edition, CCA’s Clean Cooking Industry Snapshot (“Snapshot”) brings clean cooking to the attention of investors and donors, showing investment and operational trends among for-profit, lean cooking companies working in low- and middle-income countries.
The 2023 Snapshot identifies that investment exceeded the $200 million mark and revenue surpassed $100 million – both for the first time. Beyond investment, the Snapshot tracked $104 million in revenue based on the sales information from 29 clean cooking companies — more than double pre-pandemic highs. Revenue from carbon credits sales accounted for 22% of total revenue in 2022 and is 45 times the amount recorded in 2017, making for a compounded annual growth rate of 114% during this period.
“Through dedication and patient capital, remarkable solutions have emerged, a testament to the power of perseverance,” says Jacqueline Novogratz, CEO of Acumen. According to CCA’s CEO Dymphna van der Lens, “Carbon finance is transforming the sector. For the immediate term, carbon financing represents the best opportunity for delivering pioneering clean cooking technologies at a transformational scale. But there is still a long way to go, and the industry must continue to ensure the generation of high-quality carbon credits from clean cooking projects that end buyers can procure with the utmost trust and confidence.” She adds that “the role of public funding also remains important, especially in enabling new entrants and in encouraging the wider sharing of benefits from carbon finance.”