January 20, 2011

Agnes Klingshirn honored as global thinker

The magazine Foreign Policy honors thinkers in "the global marketplace of ideas." Agnes is an advisor to the Women and Life on Earth network and a founding member of our German association. We always knew how important her work is, and she reminded us recently in Bonn that the cookstove issue connects with so many other things: the health of women and children, natural resources, poverty...

From the DECEMBER 2010 issue of Foreign Policy:

42. Agnes Klingshirn and Peter Scott

for helping the world breathe easier.

Aid worker | Germany

Stove designer | Seattle

For years, a group of engineers and aid advocates, including Agnes Klingshirn of the German aid agency GTZ, has insisted that a simple technology -- cleaner, more efficient stoves -- could work wonders in underdeveloped places like Africa and South Asia, where electricity is scarce, firewood requires long walks to the bush, and indoor fumes leave countless sick and disabled. But no one seemed to be listening.

Then in September, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, a new public-private coalition aiming to scale up stove production and distribution, getting 100 million cookstoves out to the developing world by 2020. The announcement put stove designer Peter Scott -- who is, according to a New Yorker profile last year, the movement's Thomas Edison -- front and center: The "rocket stove," an innovative, low-cost device he helped design 20 years ago, could be coming soon to a village near you.

Full report here