The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) have launched Beyond Food, an initiative that aims to provide people in communities in low-resource settings around the world with crucial access to sustainable energy for clean cooking.
In collaboration with Nama Women Advancement Establishment, the UAE and IRENA have teamed up to foster cooperation and coordinated action to promote the deployment of clean cooking solutions across the world, in a bid to tackle one of the world’s most pressing human development challenges. The partnership aims to expand and bring in more key actors working on this issue in the coming days.
Today, more than 2.6 billion people still rely on traditional fuels for their cooking needs. Access to clean and affordable energy for cooking lags well behind the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7 target of providing access to clean energy to all by 2030.
“Ensuring universal access to affordable modern energy for cooking is a major global challenge with current efforts lagging far behind the targets set forth in the global agenda for sustainable development by 2030.
This partnership seeks to advance the financing needed to bolster the deployment of clean cooking solutions while putting the issue at the forefront of the global development agenda in this critical decade of action,” said IRENA Director-General Francesco La Camera.