Promoting and disseminating clean cooking standards by working in synergy with key partners.
A cookstove under assembly, photographed during a cookstove manufacturer site visit in Kampala, Uganda.
Since 2018, ISO Capacity Building has been collaborating with the Clean Cooking Alliance, the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the World Health Organization on a series of regional workshops for clean cooking solutions. The objective of these workshops is to promote the use of ISO standards developed by technical committee ISO/TC 285, Clean cookstoves and clean cooking solutions, and the WHO Guidelines for indoor air quality: household fuel combustion in the quest for healthier communities.
These joint initiatives provide an excellent platform to unite a wide range of stakeholders through an ambitious overlapping agenda designed for national standards bodies (NSBs) and policy makers, as well as representatives from research and testing institutes. The sessions for NSBs and policy makers help to promote an understanding of the benefits of nationally adopting and/or applying the ISO standards and WHO guidelines while those for research and testing representatives are designed to train experts in the implementation of ISO 19867-1 and ISO/TR 19867-3 [1], which provide harmonized laboratory protocols for the testing of cookstoves.
During the workshops, country delegations work collaboratively to draft action plans outlining the key milestones their countries would need to reach over the next decade in order to enable a transition to cleaner cookstoves. In the long run, these training sessions aim to decrease the health, environmental and social impacts resulting from unsafe cooking practices.
Despite the challenges posed by the current pandemic, the joint workshops continue to take place in a virtual format. Participants are fully committed to these workshops because they can see the value of ISO/TC 285’s clean cooking standards and the WHO Guidelines, and their particular contribution to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for climate action (SDG 13), affordable and clean energy (SDG 7), good health and well-being (SDG 3) and gender equality (SDG 5).
- TR: technical report
Find out more about ISO’s standardization work for cleaner cooking by visiting the ISO/TC 285 page.
I welcomed the fact that we were all able to interact and had time to develop workplans. A lot of meetings are just talk. This meeting will enable action.
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