Hillary Clinton will be speaking at the Cookstoves Future Summit, supporting one of her State Department initiatives that ended up as a failure.
In a Mother’s Day 2011 article, Clinton joined with actress Julia Roberts to push an initiative to send “clean cookstoves” to poor people around the world. The cookstoves were supposed to be better for the environment, better for women’s health and easier to use. Clinton committed $50 million to the project in 2010 and, with the State Department, other US organizations committed another $55 million the following year.
In her final months in office, a joint Harvard and MIT study showed that the clean cookstoves initiative was a failure. Those given the stoves often continued to use their old stoves, while those who did use the new cookstoves did not receive the expected environmental or health benefits. In the end, families who were given the stove actually had a decrease in standard of living because of the time spent maintaining the stoves.
Even Jacob Moss, the director of the State Department’s Cookstove Initiative, praised the study that tore the initiative apart.
With so much failure behind the clean cookstove campaign, it’s a wonder Hillary is still talking about them