Applying Blended Finance to Support the Conversion to Clean Cooking
The USAID Reforestation Project, along with the private sector, is using blended finance to decrease deforestation and move toward clean cooking practices.
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Haiti’s trees and environment are the country’s natural capital. However, increasing population, migration to urban areas, worsening poverty and a lack of coherent national agricultural or energy policy has accelerated deforestation, severely limiting livelihood options for farmers. Increasingly, farmers depend on producing charcoal to rapidly growing urban areas to make ends meet, but inhaling smoke indoors while cooking with charcoal is a health threat. Cooking with charcoal also takes much more time than cooking with liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), time that could otherwise be spent earning wages or completing other family and household responsibilities. The USAID Reforestation Project has supported the manufacturing of LPG stoves and engaged the private sector in blended financing to decrease deforestation and build resilience to natural and economic shocks and stresses.
This brief was authored by Oscar Jacob (Chemonics), with contributions by Maxwell Marcelin (FERRE Haiti S.A.).
