SEECCS Harmonised support to the clean cooking sector The objective of the SEEECCS project is to strengthen the enabling environment of clean cooking sector of Ethiopia with interventions around support for organisational and institutional capacity development and sector facilitation, including for improved cook stoves, biogas and bio-fuel.

The SEECCS anticipates to contribute to develop a robust system to bring about public-private partnership and ultimately benefit the majority of Ethiopian poor families, particularly women and children who are suffering from indoor air pollution, perennial drudgery, deforestation and lately increasing climate change effects.

**Duration**

2017-2019 (with a go-no-go decision after 6 months of Inception Phase)

**Donor**

RVO (Netherlands Enterprise Agency), Dutch Government

**Clients/** **Partners**

Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Ministry of Water, Irrigation and Electricity, Ministry of Mines, Petroleum and Natural Gas, Ethiopian Standards Agency, GIZ-EnDev Programme, World Vision, Gaia Associations, Private Sector, Financial institutions The SEECCS project envisaged to attain the following specific objectives to support the development of the clean cooking sector

**Ethiopian National Forum for Clean Cooking (ENFCC)**: Lack of common institution/forum/media that could facilitate discussion of issues and common agenda couldn’t allow the private sector as well as other partners that are engaged in such endeavours to voice their problems, discuss on how they can address it, jointly demand solution for basic issues which could really make an impact in their intervention, etc. Hence, it is very important to establish ENFCC that deals on both stoves and fuels and encompass both the public and private sectors. ENFCC’s mission will be to facilitate the scaling up of the clean cookstoves and clean fuels market in Ethiopia through convening and coordinating the sector, advocating for enabling government policies, creating public awareness and capacity building. The forum strives to build solidarity amongst clean cookstoves and clean fuels stakeholders and create effective partnerships to ensure the use of clean cookstoves and fuels is the norm in Ethiopian housholds and institutions.

**Reviewing the existing policies & strategies & support their implementation**: As creating access to clean cooking is linked with different sectoral issues, it is very important to have an in-depth assessment of the respective policies and strategies. In this aspect, the project will review the existing policies of (energy, environment, forestry, health, gender, etc.), investment plan of ICS, and strategies (such as CRGE, Biomass Energy Strategy or BEST, Biofuel Strategy, etc.). The project will also support finalizing policies/strategies that are in the draft form (such as the energy policy) and/or those that are finalised but not endorsed by the government (such as the Biomass Energy Strategy - BEST).The review will help the project to thoroughly analyse those documents and as a result highlight the strength, identify the existing gaps and make practical recommendation as required. Policies and strategies have to be well recognized and understood by development partners for their effective implementation. The project will work on sensitization so that sectors will be able to realize the linkage between policies and strategies of different actors and also producing guideline to simplify and facilitate the implementation of some of the strategies

**To support fine-tuning and getting approval of national standards for ICS in line with the ISO IWA tier definition: **There have been several initiatives in drafting a national standard for ICS in the country. They are however not finalised. Hence considering the importance of such a standard in a market that is emerging with varied types and quality of products, it is very imperative that a national standard is finalised, following some credible existing standard, the ISO IWA standard being the most popular, many countries are already adopting to.

**To support strengthening of the national energy lab to become a state-of-the-art facility for testing and certification for ICS: **Given the size of the country and the potential impact of promoting quality ICS in the country, it is very important to have national energy lab with a state-of-the-art-facility that strongly support the enforcement of the national ICS and fuel standards as well as promote research and development that gears to invent different clean cooking technologies and fuels. Hence, the project support to mobilise resource by drafting proposal with the details of the lab facilities and the capacity building requirement as well as the budget for establishment of such a laboratory.