Giving Compass' Take:

• Stanford Social Innovation Review examines the efforts of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves in the context of "acceleration strategies," which includes investment and collective action.

• What did the Alliance do right and wrong, and what can other organizations learn from its efforts to get clean cookstoves in 100 million households by 2020? The main takeaway: It helps to take impact steps one by one, rather than try to tackle everything at once.

• Learn more about the conundrum between cookstoves and carbon offsets.

When then US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, announced the launch of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves (the Alliance) in 2010, she supported an audacious goal — 100 million households adopting clean cookstoves and fuels by 2020. Bringing together leaders from government, civil society, and the private sector, the Alliance aimed to harness the power of markets to build a robust and thriving industry that could help alleviate poverty and enhance sustainable development. The question then, and now, is what do organizations like the Alliance need to do to make this vision a reality?

Development organizations, foundations, nonprofits, and governments have invested in a variety of programs to unlock the transformative power of business to help tackle some of society’s greatest challenges. From encouraging policy reforms and launching incubators that nurture enterprise growth, to leading awareness and behavior change campaigns that drive consumer demand, these programs have been stepping stones to building industries that generate sustainable and scalable impact — what we call “impact industries.”

In 2015, five years after its launch, the Alliance reported the distribution of 53 million clean or efficient cookstoves and fuels, more than half way to its goal of 100 million households by 2020. To achieve this milestone the Alliance has had to simultaneously address the many barriers that impede the purchase and use of clean cookstoves and fuels.

Our research found that accelerating the clean cookstove industry targeting the Base of the Pyramid involved four different, yet interconnected, stages of acceleration. Each of the four stages (see “Four acceleration strategies for the clean cookstove industry” below) emphasized a specific acceleration strategy—investment, collective action, profitability, and impact—and all four were critical in the development of this impact industry.

1. Accelerate Investment: Before the Alliance could do anything meaningful, both financial and non-financial resources were needed. While initially these resources came from various players in the development sector, the source of this investment has changed over time to include some private sector support.

2. Accelerate Collective Action: While creating a wide investment proposition in the accelerating investment stage supported a variety of stakeholders investing in the clean cooking industry, it also presented the challenge of responding to a diverse set of interests and motivations. Potential partners want order, but they do not want to be ordered. As such, the Alliance had to build industry legitimacy in order to facilitate collective action. Success in this stage of acceleration can be measured by the perceived legitimacy of the impact industry.

3. Accelerate Profitability: The Alliance’s market building activities were not directed at a specific enterprise. Rather they were targeted at building the market environment that surrounds these companies, so that all the enterprises in a market were better positioned to become profitable. Success in this stage can be measured by the establishment of durable and robust markets for clean cookstoves and fuels.

4. Accelerate Impact: The Alliance recognized that only when enterprises are sustainable at scale can the industry’s impact goals be achieved. If the enterprises are unsustainable or remain small, the opportunity for impact will be limited. The Alliance’s activities and investments at this stage of acceleration focused on specific enterprises and included broader support for experimentation and innovation followed by targeting resources toward the best opportunities for sustainable growth. Success in this stage can be measured by the scaling of enterprises within and across geographies in a manner that is economically sustainable. This includes both the growth of specific enterprises and the replication of successful business models by other enterprises.

Read the full article about accelerating an impact industry and clean cook stoves by Ted London and Colm Fay at Stanford Social Innovation Review.