Context

As global temperatures rise, 2.2 billion people still live without access to clean, efficient cooling. Extreme heat threatens their health, spoils medicines, ruins crops, and makes it difficult to work, study, or even sleep. It strikes everywhere—from fields and factories to homes and hospitals—with the most vulnerable facing the greatest danger.

The solution is fair cooling: affordable, accessible systems that don’t worsen the climate crisis and are shaped by the needs of at-risk communities. Delivering this challenge requires joint action from governments, businesses, and the voluntary sector.

Enter Ashden and the Fair Cooling Fund. Backed by the Kigali Cooling Efficiency Program (K-CEP, managed by the ClimateWorks Foundation), the fund has awarded grants of up to $100,000 to seven pioneering organisations across five countries—all working to tackle the cooling crisis.

Approach

The Fair Cooling Fund did more than provide funding—it fostered innovation through collaboration and a co-development process. We brought together a diverse cohort of changemakers and designed and facilitated a process where supported them in developing their ideas. This process helped turn early concepts into powerful, practical, scaleable plans. Through peer learning, workshops (including sessions with external experts), and creative tools like empathy canvases and learning journals, participants built stronger, more impactful solutions.

The co-development approach helped to unlocked a host of benefits and opportunities, ranging from greater holistic thinking and cross-sector working to the creation of new narratives about an often-hidden issue. Importantly, it has helped an array of organisations – from the worlds of business, academia and beyond – work towards social impact in new and exciting ways.

Feedback from the grant recipients indicates that the process was a success – helping them focus their efforts on social impact and reaching the most marginalised.  Ashden produced a detailed analysis of our programme in the report, Working Together for a Fairer, Cooler World.

My role

A wide and varied role spanning the design and delivery phases of the Fair Cooling Fund. It involved designing and delivering insight research, leading co-design sessions, facilitating collaborative workshops, designing and shaping the programme framework, co-developing key programme materials, ongoing strategic input and support, project planning, visualising evolving processes and designs , and embedding peer learning and relational approaches at heart of the co-development process.