Transcrevo da Economist de 25/9/2010. Um exemplo de uma necessidade que a maioria de nós ignora…

Indoor pollution

Smoke from cooking stoves kills poor people

Sep 23rd 2010 | NEW YORK

 AFTER vaccines and bed nets, could the humble cooking stove be the next big idea to save millions of lives in poor countries? Hillary Clinton, America’s secretary of state, hopes so. She was marking the launch on September 21st of a new alliance that aims to raise $250m to supply clean stoves to 100m poor households by 2020.

Around two billion people have no access to modern energy, and a billion have it only sporadically. The smoky stoves that many of them use, the World Health Organisation reckons, produce particulate pollution that causes around 2m premature deaths a year. Makeshift cookers also catch fire easily, maiming and killing. And lives are not the only things wasted. Women and girls in rural villages lose time and energy walking around collecting dirty solid fuels, ranging from crop waste to cow dung (better used as fertiliser).

The appeal of a stove that produces more heat, more cleanly and with less fuel is clear. But Kirk Smith, a stove specialist at the University of California at Berkeley, points out that most efforts to promote cleaner stoves have flopped. Too much emphasis has gone on technology and talking to people at the top, too little to consulting the women who actually do the cooking. When subsidies run out, the schemes have faltered, with stoves left unused or broken.

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Another lesson of past failures, says Daniel Kammen, who runs the World Bank’s clean-energy programmes, is the need for better data about how stoves are actually used. That is increasingly possible, because cheap sensors can be embedded in stoves. At Berkeley, Mr Smith’s team is working with Vodafone, a mobile-phone company, on a wireless gadget that allows researchers on motorcycles to download the data from stoves. Some in the alliance also hope to tap the money available to curb greenhouse-gas emissions.

But the best reason for hope may lie in the new-found awareness of market forces among governments and the UN crowd. Pressed on this point, Mrs Clinton says emphatically that the new stoves “must not be given away”. As with anti malarial bed nets, she argues, charging a little makes people value and use them properly.

That will come as good news to the small army of entrepreneurs in the developing world now coming up with novel business models to sell and service the cooking stoves. One such innovator is Suraj Wahab of Toyola, a start-up selling some 60,000 stoves a year in Ghana by offering micro-credit. His advice to the new UN coalition is “please don’t offer handouts and don’t give away stoves.””