How to Save Lives and Lower Fuel Consumption: Clean Cookstoves

Exposure to smoke from traditional cookstoves and open fires – the primary means of cooking and heating for nearly 3 billion people in the developing world – causes 2 million premature deaths annually, with women and children the most affected.

Microfinance for Water: An Example of Client-Focused Innovation

As Michael Porter and other insightful business thinkers have emphasized, excessive focus on short-term financial performance while ignoring customer and community well-being distorts decision making, inhibits innovation and ultimately limits financial success.

Can the Microfinance Sector Help Deliver Clean Energy?

Offering financial products that enable poor clients to purchase clean, low-carbon alternatives to kerosene, firewood and other conventional fuels is perhaps the most direct way in which microfinance can be mobilized to combat climate change and preserve ecological resources.

Making Clean Technology A Viable Business for Women in Africa

Energy poverty, climate change, financial inclusion and women empowerment are all closely related. Of the 1.6 billion people globally without access to electricity, 70% are women and girls.

Scaling Climate Smart Agriculture by Financing Small and Growing Businesses

Excluded from formal markets and unable to access agricultural inputs, market information and credit, many rural poor adopt survival techniques such as illegal logging and slash-and-burn agriculture that degrade the environment and contribute to global warming.