Summary
Evidence shows that improved cooking solutions (ICS) can have a positive impact on a wide range of environmental and social outcomes. More than 2.85 billion people in developing countries rely on solid fuels – for example wood, charcoal, dung or coal – as their primary means of cooking. Conventional cooking methods using solid fuels, mainly open fires and rudimentary cookstoves, are inefficient, unhealthy, and unsafe. Their negative impacts range from the extensive time and costs required for fuel production and collection to the health and environmental impacts of emissions from inefficient combustion of these fuels. Many of these negative impacts can be alleviated through the adoption of improved cooking solutions. This study aims to shed light on the shared value that investors create through supporting ICS, in order to attract more capital to ICS. It builds on earlier work commissioned by the Gold Standard Foundation (GSF) by valuing a broad set of co-benefits and using new primary data from the GSF portfolio.