Africare NIgeria Receives Award from McCann Global Health for Cookstoves

As part of efforts to drive adoption of clean cook stoves and fuels around the world, the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves has announced awards to four organizations to design and manage behavior change communication (BCC) interventions in Bangladesh, Kenya and Nigeria. Africare Nigeria has received one of the sought after awards from McCann Global Health.

McCann Health is the world’s most-awarded professional and consumer health network, and is fully integrated into McCann Worldgroup, the largest marketing communications agency network in the world. Africare Nigeria engages in projects that leverage local resources for under-served communities to solve their own development challenges, prioritizing the cross-cutting themes of economic development, nutrition, water, WASH, women’s empowerment, and youth engagement.

According to Africare Country Director Orode Doherty, Africare began working on cooking related issues in 2012, and have since worked with the Nigerian LPG and cookstove community to develop programs aimed at increasing uptake of cleaner stoves and fuels across 11 states in Nigeria. The team will focus efforts in two states in Nigeria, with a primary goal of motivating women to make the switch from kerosene to LPG for cooking. They will leverage the expertise of the McCann communications network to develop a mass media campaign, and build on Africare’ s existing community level programs and relationships with the LPG community in Nigeria, including their work with over 100 women’s cooperatives, to integrate more women into the LPG distribution chain.

Selected from more than 60 proposals, the BCC interventions will take place over the next two years and are expected to deliver impactful, evidence-based communications aimed at influencing consumer purchasing decisions and encouraging consistent use of cleaner cooking options.  The interventions will employ a variety of outreach tools, communication channels, and creative concepts, including a new cooking-focused reality TV show, radio programming, mobile messaging, roadshows, street theater, and more.

“These behavior change interventions will help increase consumer demand for a range of higher-performing cookstoves and fuels, improving lives, protecting the environment, and enabling manufacturers to meet the needs of more and more households,” said Brian Smith, Chief Operating Officer of the Alliance. “The Alliance’s added focus on demand creation comes at a time when there’s a wider selection of higher-quality stoves available than ever before.”

The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves is a public-private partnership hosted by the UN Foundation to save lives, improve livelihoods, empower women, and protect the environment by creating a thriving global market for clean and efficient household cooking solutions. The Alliance’s 100 by ‘20 goal calls for 100 million households to gain access to clean and efficient cookstoves and fuels by 2020. The Alliance works with a strong network of public, private and non-profit partners to accelerate the production, deployment, and use of clean and efficient cookstoves and fuels in developing countries.

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