GTZ hands over international award

The Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) shared the award with the Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MoARD)

GTZ received the award earlier this year, on the third Biennial Partnership for Clean Indoor Air (PCIA) Forum in India. The energy project of the Ethiopian-German program for Sustainable Utilization of Natural Resources (SUN) was honoured by the PCIA for its commercial strategy for increasing the use of clean and efficient MIRT cook stoves. These stoves use significantly less firewood and reduce indoor air pollution, so improving peoples’ health and quality of life.

Handing over the award GTZ pointed out that without the full support of MoARD, the owner of the project, this result would not have been achieved. “Let this award be a reminder of what is possible to achieve and a motivation to work even harder”, Amhare Worku from the Ministry said at the ceremony. SUN Energy is currently operating in 215 towns in Amhara, Oromiya and Tigray with about 341 small scale stove production enterprises. Through the market approach more than 140,000 stoves have been sold in the regions of intervention. Samson Tolessa, Manager of the GTZ-SUN Energy project explains: “Selling the stoves rather than distributing them for free proved to be a sustainable and successful way of finding the public acceptance for the stove.”