Climate Justice for 3 Billion People

Tara Ramanathan believes that social impact is achievable at scale when we listen to the end users–the poorest 3 billion. Leveraging her civic engagement background, she’s sparking a movement that brings poor and marginalized communities to the forefront of climate change action. As Director at Nexleaf Analytics, Tara leads the strategy on helping underserved communities in low-income countries transition to cleaner energy. 

While a student activist at University of California, San Diego, Tara pushed for divestment from Darfur during the genocide. This experience shaped her worldview for social impact: a powerful message needs strategic actions to achieve outcomes. She has taught in one of Delhi’s biggest slums as well as inner-city schools in Oakland, California, which led to her later work at a research institution on urban poverty. She received her MBA from Oxford University with a focus on systems change and developing business models to scale clean cooking worldwide.

The project aims to reenact the power and vigor of the industrial revolution but with modern and clean energy for the poorest 3 billion people. The simple act of cooking or keeping a home warm is endangering the health of 3 billion worldwide and affecting the environment. Yet, poor and marginalized communities continue to be underserved and underrepresented in climate action. 

My team collaborates with rural households in Nigeria, India, Tanzania, and Bangladesh to find clean energy solutions that can eventually be scaled up and alleviate energy poverty globally. We test solutions in small cohorts and fold their feedback back into designs ensuring only proven solutions come to market and serve the needs of the people. Our project elevates humanity by having global stakeholders confront the continued marginalization of 3 billion people in energy as well as by advocating for greater representation and inclusivity of rural communities.

Despite increasing awareness of and attention to the damaging health and environmental impacts resulting from traditional cooking, the global access to clean cooking deficit has remained stagnant at almost 3B people—approximately 39% of the global population. The WHO estimates that the smoke produced by these fires kills over 4M people annually–more than the death toll of HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined. 

The WHO, United Nations, and many countries, including India, have put clean cooking at the top of their agenda. Millions of dollars and decades of research and implementation have been devoted to tackling unsafe cooking practices, yet the problem persists. That’s because the quality of products aren’t good enough. 

We have until 2030 to take urgent action before the effects of climate change become irreversible. As we’ve seen with COVID-19, the world can share an event, but we experience it differently. Similarly, climate change disproportionately affects low-income communities. 

A crucial piece missing in clean energy is the voice of rural communities. That’s why our efforts are aimed at working directly with local communities. We take bold and innovative action, which includes bringing in new ideas and talents, from engineering to financing.

The project aims to kickstart a Clean Energy Revolution that makes clean energy accessible, affordable, and adoptable. We connect data gathering hardware to modern clean cooking appliances to track usage patterns. From this, we know when and how often women cook on their newer appliances and can learn what works and what doesn’t. We analyze this consumer feedback and work with manufacturers, donors, and implementers to fold feedback back into the designs and implementation models. Think about this as a Yelp review but for the global development and investment industry. Advocating and designing with data ensures that only proven stoves are distributed to impoverished communities and upholds our responsibility to meet the needs of rural communities.  

The Elevate Prize will support the growth of proven work by helping us reach more communities and by amplifying the need to design with–not for–the poor. Ultimately this project will make access to clean energy as ubiquitous as the mobile phone.

We currently work with hundreds of families from rural villages in Nigeria, India, Tanzania, and Bangladesh, with the aspiration to spark a clean energy revolution that will affect 3 billion people. The households we work with typically live on less than $2/day and rely on outdated practices for cooking–this includes making stoves out of mud inside their homes or setting up three stones like a tripod and perching a pot on top. This way of cooking is hazardous to their health and the environment, but the clean cooking alternatives aren’t good enough–they’re either too expensive, inconvenient to use, or break easily. 

Engaging local communities is at the heart of our work. Underrepresentation of marginalized communities has been a major roadblock to progress in the clean cooking space. That’s why we actively coordinate and communicate with the local communities, including data gathering on usage via sensor devices as well as pre- and post-project interviews, and fold the findings into further projects as well as sharing findings with other stakeholders. We originally started our project in a couple of villages in India, and now reach four countries and with a plan to reach everyone who needs a clean cookstove.

Household air pollution is a pervasive issue, affecting a huge portion of the global pollution and will only worsen as we approach 2030. With only a decade to make substantial change and impact for 3 billion people, our team is advocating for a radically different approach centered around bringing visibility to the role of rural communities. On top of bringing awareness to the problems holding clean household energy back, we’re also using the data we gather to pinpoint how the global community can build solutions that are inclusive and representative of the poorest 3 billion people.

The program was launched in 2014 when we partnered with an Indian NGO to distribute clean cooking solutions to 4,000 households. We simultaneously launched an innovative financing mechanism that would pay women for their reduction in carbon emissions based on the time they cooked on the cleaner stove versus the older one. We used sensor devices to track cooking activity. Within 6 months stove use dropped significantly. I followed up with the women to listen and understand why they weren’t using the stoves. Turned out most of the stoves had broken or women simply didn’t like them. This informed the north star of my program: ensuring clean cooking solutions are reliable and meet women’s needs.

Cooking activity data was too powerful not to share, so part of the model became to share feedback with manufacturers, designers, implementers, and funders to inform their approaches. Since then we’ve distributed stoves that cater to the needs of households and have seen evidence of long-term use–one village in India has used their stoves for over two years proving that a clean energy future is possible. I want to broadcast this message loud and clear: when women receive good quality stoves, they’ll use them.

I'm passionate about women’s empowerment and uplifting the voices of those that have been marginalized for far too long. From the time I was a young girl up until now, I’ve been fortunate to have women role models encouraging me to raise my voice and speak my mind. My mom, as an immigrant from India, taught me the importance of leveraging my education and resources to help others.  

When I first joined Nexleaf in 2014, I spent 2 months living in a village in Odisha, India. I saw people in the villages welcome stove distributors into their households without even having a choice in which stoves they were taking. The stove distributors made it seem like the women should feel lucky to receive anything at all. I never saw anyone ask the women if they even liked the stove, instead they would try to convince the women to use the stoves. It was in that moment that I built a determination and devotion to bring women’s voice to the forefront of the global clean cooking industry.

Over the past 20 years, I have worked on and thought deeply about solutions that can effectively meet the needs of poor and low-resourced communities. I have spent my professional career working in urban slums and rural villages, teaching students in low-income schools, fighting for policy change in large institutions, and getting an MBA from Oxford with a focus on entrepreneurship and systems change thinking. I have the experience required to lead the change to solve the unsolved problem of clean cooking and climate change mitigation. And working with me is a wonderful and committed team. The team spans three countries, composed of advocates, entrepreneurs, engineers, and grassroots activists. 

I know this problem will require a global effort and I have built the multi-faceted partnerships and stakeholder relationships needed to solve this problem: stove manufacturers and designers; funders and influencers; policy-makers and governments; and NGOs working on the ground with rural communities. I have gained recognition as an advocate of better systems by speaking at the Vatican, United Nations conferences and other major global convenings around the world.

In 2014, I partnered with an Indian NGO to distribute clean stoves to 4,000 households in 29 villages in Odisha, India. We identified a stove manufactured in India that met emissions standards to protect a family’s health and we had an innovative financing mechanism to make it affordable. We had it all figured out. 

But after 6 months, I discovered that over 50% of the stoves had broken. I visited the households and will never forget the disappointed looks on their faces. After all, these are some of the poorest families in Odisha and the last thing they needed was a wasted product in their home that they had to pay for. I took this failure as an opportunity to redesign my approach. I listened to the households, surveying women in every village and uncovered the failure points of the project. Afterwards, stove selection was done in collaboration with women and stoves were only scaled if women liked and actually used them. This led to a roaring success in which all women used the chosen stove every day and expressed genuine happiness with the stove. 

When I graduated from University of California, San Diego (UCSD) there were over 40 activist groups tackling problems ranging from fair trade coffee to immigration rights to removing clothes on campus sourced from sweatshop labor. But, rewinding to my first year at UCSD, there were no activist groups. My professor said, “If you don’t see something, you need to start something.” So I did. 

At the time, the Iraq war was going on and protests were happening everywhere except on my campus. I made an anti-war poster and stood on the main college walkway and engaged anyone open to talking. I met another student interested in getting involved, and eventually met more and more people ready to take action. We learned about the genocide in Darfur and were disappointed to learn that University of California was investing billions of dollars in oil companies doing business in Darfur. I created a student group, and within 2 years I led our team to the UC Regents office where we joined forces with all the UC campuses towards a successful vote to divest. I have maintained that spirit of engagement and activism and continue to be an agent for change.

After years of technology development, sensor-based evidence generation, publications of scientific findings, and extensive cookstove lab and field testing, my project has made significant progress in countering false assumptions and identifying critical challenges that have hindered the clean cooking sector. We’re applying technology to a persistent problem to gather data. But the innovativeness of my project isn’t the hardware, it’s the power that data and a systems change approach has shown in challenging deeply-entrenched conventions and restructuring how the global community designs and collaborates with the end users. Because our project places the voices and needs of local households at the forefront of climate action, we’re able to spark a movement that is community driven and results based and therefore creates unprecedented change in clean energy delivery. 

Over the past 6 years, my project has worked across sectors to bring real-time sensor data and analytic insights to identify and improve critical gaps affecting the performance, maintenance, financing, and design of life-saving equipment. We have tested 21 clean cooking products in 1559 households, and have identified gaps at every stage of the clean cooking life cycle–from development to delivery–such as products designed too small for the average family size or a lack of local after-sales service.

Current: We currently work with over 500 households in 4 countries. Given that most of the villages we work with are multi-generational homes, we estimate working with 2000-2500 individuals. 

One Year: Our plans for scaling intend to reach 1000 households (estimated 4000-5000 people). 

Five Years: Our plans for scaling intend to reach 1 million households (estimated 5 million people).

This initiative is about amassing a movement and creating a catalytic effect that will make effective cooking solutions as ubiquitous as mobile phones are today. We aim to elevate women’s voices to the forefront of product design and deployment, as well as inform manufacturing, scale-up and investment of better cooking solutions and cleaner fuels for women to ensure long-term impacts for the planet.

1. 2020-2023: Identify the right combination of effective cooking solutions, distribution schemes, and financing models that should be scaled to 1 million households 

2. 2024-2026: 1 million households (~5 million people) are cooking on and adopting reliable, effective solutions in their homes

3. 2027-2028: 100 million households (~500 million people) nationwide are adopting reliable, effective solutions. Higher quality solutions become increasingly affordable and appeal to a wide array of cultural contexts.

4. 2028-2030: ~1.5-2 billion people are cooking on reliable solutions and have access to a diverse array of clean cooking solutions, reliable fuel supply chains, and affordable financing that puts high quality products within their reach. Clean cooking is, by default, integrated into energy planning schemes in every country.

1. Finding stove models and fuel types that work for local communities. Many of the existing options have shown limitations to long-term use, such as durability issues or poor design. For far too long the voices and preferences of actual cookstove users have been absent in their design and implementation. Only by listening to women and understanding the ways in which current cooking solutions fall short can we build the solutions that will fulfill clean cooking’s promise.

2. Substantial decline in funding for clean cookstove initiatives in recent years due to lackluster results and stagnating interest. According to the 2019 Tracking SDG7: The Energy Progress Report, financial commitments have fluctuated from $32 million in 2013 up to $117 million in 2015 back down to $32 million in 2017.

3. Lack of transparency into what cooking solutions are performing the best in order to guide scale-up plans.

1. Listening to what communities want. Digging into out-of-the-box integrated solutions that bring together electrification efforts happening in off-grid areas with clean cooking efforts. One example is our partnership with Access to Energy Institute, PowerGen, Tatedo and MECS to distribute pressure cookers in Tanzania. Connecting power and cooking is an innovative way of positioning rural communities to be pioneers in the clean energy revolution. 

2. Our advocacy efforts are aimed at reenergizing funding and support by bringing in new donors and building crosscutting alliances. We’ve already laid the foundation with our partnerships with Sustainable Energy for All (SE4All), Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC), Access to Energy Initiative (A2EI), and Rural Women Energy Security in Nigeria (RUWES), and are actively working on bringing new engagement and perspective into the space.  

3. To have full transparency into which cooking solutions are truly effective, we must be able to monitor the array of cooking technologies available, With support from Autodesk Foundation, this project has successfully entered the electric cooking ecosystem and advanced our understanding of data needs in the electric cooking space. Creating this technology and entering the e-cooking space brings the opportunity for the team to build new private sector partnerships with utility and power companies that we can join forces with to shape the market. Ultimately, we aim to convince governments to adopt a data-driven approach to clean cooking policies and scale.

Our advocacy for user-centered design and implementation, driven by better data, has been embraced by critical sector leaders and stakeholders. We have already laid the foundation with our partnerships with Sustainable Energy for All (SE4All), Tata Trusts, United Nations Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC), Access to Energy Initiative (A2EI), and Rural Women Energy Security in Nigeria (RUWES), and are actively working on bringing new engagement and perspective into the space. With these partnerships, we will rally the sector to require high quality data on the performance and adoption of cleaner cooking solutions through advocacy and coalition building. We have seen that markets can be shaped by influential global actors that have the ability to inform financial flows, country-level policy-making, and public-private sector partnerships. We believe our partnerships can drive these influential pathways. Our recent report from our pilot project in Nigeria demonstrates the value of partnering with stakeholders, and listening to and documenting feedback from women as well as pairing that feedback with our sensor data on stove utilization.

Our future business model relates to the climate credit model we developed in 2014. People and entities interested in supporting local communities directly would be able to buy climate credits which would be dispersed to households based on their usage of cleaner energy. Households looking for affordable and cleaner cooking appliances would be able to purchase quality stoves that would otherwise be beyond their means. The climate credits would be enough to help them repay the loan on the stove and earn extra income every month. 

When we realized that many of the stoves would break after 6 months, we didn’t think it was fair to the households to hold them accountable to the loan. We’re building a concept note with the Fair Climate Fund, and we’re about 3 years away from having a concrete plan. Part of the vision though is to include the climate credit model when we scale clean energy solutions to ensure that under-resourced communities can lead healthy and prosperous lives.

As a non-profit organization, we receive public and private funding. We eventually plan to scale the climate credit model once we have found the right cooking products that will be reliable and de-risk the investment for investors.

Grant funding from 2020-2023: We hope to raise ~$3-5 million over the next 3 years to achieve our goals. 

~$650,000

I ultimately hope that reliable, safe and clean cooking solutions can be effectively deployed to 1 million households and thereby create a suite of solutions that can be globally adopted among the poorest 3 billion. A crucial piece missing in clean energy implementation is the voice of rural communities, of the people expected to displace polluting cooking practices. That’s why our efforts are aimed at working directly with local communities. 

We need the Elevate Prize to broadcast the needs of these communities by building awareness and driving action to scale clean cooking solutions globally.

The Elevate Prize can help us in the following ways:

1. Broadcasting our message will help us shift the global narrative from let’s change women’s behavior to let’s get women the cooking solutions they deserve.

2. Putting our project front and center will amplify our bold messaging to gain wider recognition and support.

3. Networking opportunities with innovative stakeholders such as MIT Solve will be critical in our efforts to bring game-changing designs to the poorest 3 billion people.

4. This funding support will bolster existing philanthropic support we have to allow us to test our hypothesis in the innovative electric cooking space which has much promise to meet women’s needs.

1. Marketing, media and exposure: We have proven results of our work and we have the skills and leadership to push forth our mission, but we need a platform that will help elevate our messaging on the importance of designing with–not for–the poor and ensuring life-saving equipment is actually effective. 

2. Funding and revenue: Our connections to funders are limited to the clean cookstove space. We would benefit from access to a broader network of funders that we can build relationships with both from the lens of climate change and health of people. 

3. Board members or advisors: This project is, of course, first and foremost about delivering solutions to the poorest communities. But it is also about changing an entire system. We would love to get connections with experts in systems change thinking who can think about the four pillars of a system: manufacturing/design, financing, implementation, and policy.

The partnerships we seek are tied to our out-of-the-box innovative approach. We need partners that go beyond the norm and think dynamically. We need to partner with power companies such as Tata Power in India who are building mass movements to scale up micro-grids to tens of thousands of households. We need partnerships with funders that are investing in a systems change approach, not just a simple distribution model where services are delivered. We need partnerships with innovators such as MIT Solve who can help us elevate women’s voices to the forefront of design.