Creating a saleable health product from clean cookstoves: Lao PDR, 2014.
Author: CQuestCapital
Four Good Reasons to Try in Lao PDR
1. Convincing evidence that cooking over open fires and with woody biomass is a major cause of disease, including in Lao PDR:
- Laos may have highest burden of disease in world from household air pollution from biomass smoke
- 223,000 years of life lost (YLL) worth 3.5% of GDP, assuming YLL as lost productivity using GDP per capita
2. Health Performance metric exists: Averted DALYs
- WHO recognized measure of burden of disease
3. Improved measurement and analytical tools now exist to understand pollution exposure-response relationship
- Pioneering work by Professor Kirk Smith and colleagues at University of California, Berkeley, has created tools to quantify and price reductions in DALYs
4. Firewood and woody biomass stove technology has matured rapidly over the past three years
- clean modern wood-burning cookstoves are now commercially available at scale, including Phillips Gasifier stove (from Africa Clean Energy) and Biolite (even charge cell phone), USA.
