In what ways could the widespread adoption of clean cookstoves?

Developing and emerging economies face a complex challenge when it comes to their energy infrastructure: they must meet the needs of growing populations that still lack access to basic services like water and electricity but – the climate crisis front and centre – they must also be part of the solution by answering the global climate emergency through innovative efforts to ensure a low-carbon future.

This article is part of Friends of Europe’s “Energy for Development” discussion paper. Beginning on the day of the UN Secretary-General Summit on Climate Action and ending at the time of COP 25 in Santiago, Friends of Europe will release such articles online on a weekly basis. The full publication will be launched in December and its insights and recommendations aim to demonstrate that it is possible to achieve SDG 7 well before 2030, and inform the next EU mandate on actions to take.

Some 3bn people around the world, mostly in low- and middle-income countries, cook their food using biomass in inefficient open fires or with traditional stoves in poorly ventilated rooms. They often rely on heavily-polluting fuels like charcoal, kerosene, wood and animal dung. Cooking this way is not only costly, but the cause of more than 4mn deaths annually. This exceeds the number of those who die from HIV, tuberculosis and malaria combined.

The adoption of cleaner and more efficient cookstoves and fuels can dramatically reduce exposure to harmful cooking smoke, reduce fuel costs for most families and cut down on forest degradation.

The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves was set up in 2010 to address these challenges through the creation of a global market for clean and efficient household cooking solutions. While most of the companies formed out of this process took to distributing stoves to consumers in developing countries, companies like BURN Manufacturing adopted a different model. Instead of focusing on distribution, they invested in manufacturing locally – in Kenya – enabling communities to take ownership and allow BURN to modify the process to reflect these communities’ needs.

In Kenya, around 60% of the population continues to rely on solid fuels to cook their food. The average household of five people spends approximately $2 per day on fuel, making cooking an expensive affair. A traditional stove is the cheapest option available to most, though many remain unaware of the financial drain and health implications of cooking in this way.

There is also a cultural element that needs to be addressed: traditional cooking practices tend to promote open fire cooking

The company’s stoves are designed and engineered to reduce harmful carbon dioxide emissions from burning biomass fuels such as charcoal and firewood. Since the establishment of the BURN Manufacturing’s plant – Sub-Saharan Africa’s first solar powered, modern clean cookstove plant – more than 3mn tonnes of wood have been saved. These cookstoves have also been instrumental in reducing over 5.3mn tonnes of harmful carbon dioxide emissions. Furthermore, their consumers’ fuel consumption decreased by 56%, saving them about $150-300 annually.

Companies looking to invest in developing clean stoves in countries that need them also have an opportunity to help local communities by promoting gender equality. Appointing more women in manufacturing roles – as BURN Manufacturing has done – can help shift perceptions about what women ‘can’ do and provide a way in for women can take the lead in delivering energy to their own communities.

Despite all of these benefits, obstacles to widespread adoption do remain. On a market level, the cookstove industry aims to address barriers that impede the production, deployment, and use of clean, efficient stoves and their fuels in developing countries. Local authorities can help by providing manufacturers with tariff exemptions for assembling materials. This would allow the industry to reduce manufacturing costs and lower costs for consumers.

There is also a cultural element that needs to be addressed: traditional cooking practices tend to promote open fire cooking. Public awareness of the benefits of switching to cleaner, safer stoves will help encourage behavioural change. It is important to frame this transition not as one that challenges local culture, but as being beneficial to both health and economy while allowing cooking traditions to be maintained. Manufacturing locally supports this process, bolstering a sense of ownership and increasing usage within these communities.

The International Energy Agency predicts that 2.2bn people will still be without access to clean cooking facilities in 2030 and experts estimate that over the next 30 years, biomass will continue to supply between 70-80% of all household energy needs in sub-Saharan Africa. It is clear that a great deal more must be done to ensure the widespread adoption of clean cooking stoves across Africa and the wider developing world.

Sustainable funding is also needed to help the sector grow and meet its goal of a world where cooking does not kill

A broad marketing strategy can help in this regard. By connecting corporate and product brands to climate action, consumers recognise the benefits of purchasing a clean cookstove beyond their own needs. This creates added value to products and a unique selling point.

Sustainable funding is also needed to help the sector grow and meet its goal of a world where cooking does not kill. Access to sufficient funding allows a company to establish itself and mature. This growing stability gives a recipient business the opportunity to carve out a market for its product while also enabling it to innovate and expand.

Greater investment from public and private sector organisations would go a long way in supporting innovation and manufacturing in the cookstove sector. A steady flow of funding could allow clean stoves to reach a wider market, increase manufacturing capacity and at the same time subsidise the cost of stoves.

Creating partnerships with different financial institutions and ‘pay-as-you-go’ companies, which BURN Manufacturing has done, provides an opportunity to reduce costs for consumers feeling the pinch. These companies offer credit, in some cases even allowing customers to pay as low as $1 a week for an agreed period of time. Having an array of credit lines also allows a company to extend credit to small-scale distributors and in turn increase their product’s reach, in this case stoves.

Finally, investing in research and development to develop low-cost but fuel-efficient stoves would also help increase their adoption in Kenya and beyond. There is still ample room for innovation in this area – and companies like BURN Manufacturing will have to continue to play a greater role in ensuring that affordable and clean cookstoves are available to households across sub-Saharan Africa.

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Improved cookstoves (ICS) have the potential to deliver the triple dividends of household health and time savings, local environmental quality improvements, and reduced impacts on climate. However, despite clear scientific evidence on the potential efficacy of these innovations, these technologies have run into important translation challenges that have impeded their widespread diffusion and dissemination. Our original TRAction project – Designing and Evaluating Behavior Change Interventions to Improve the Adoption and Use of Improved Cookstoves – was developed in response to a refrain of calls for applied research to develop a more refined understanding of the nature of these challenges.

Click here to watch a webinar on the TRAction projects. Or listen to this podcast about the project and what we learned.

Visit Duke Household, Energy & Health Initiative website

In what ways could the widespread adoption of clean cookstoves?
Main research collaborators:

  • Jessica Lewis; Subhrendu Pattanayak; Jie-Sheng Tan Soo (Duke)
  • Nina Brooks (NORC)
  • Laura Morrison (RTI International)
  • Abhishek Kar; Omkar Patange; Ibrahim Rehman (TERI)
  • Vasundhara Bhojvaid (Delhi School of Economics)
  • Veerabhadran Ramanathan (UCSD)
  • Nithya Ramanathan (Nexleaf)

Related Publications:

Pattanayak, S.K.; M. Jeuland, J.J. Lewis, F. Usmani, et al. (2019) “Experimental Evidence on Promotion of Electric and Improved Biomass Cookstoves.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1808827166.

Abstract: Improved cookstoves (ICS) can deliver “triple wins” by improving household health, local environments, and global climate. Yet their potential is in doubt because of low and slow diffusion, likely because of constraints imposed by differences in culture, geography, institutions, and missing markets. We offer insights about this challenge based on a multiyear, multiphase study with nearly 1,000 households in the Indian Himalayas. In phase I, we combined desk reviews, simulations, and focus groups to diagnose barriers to ICS adoption. In phase II, we implemented a set of pilots to simulate a mature market and designed an intervention that upgraded the supply chain (combining marketing and home delivery), provided rebates and financing to lower income and liquidity constraints, and allowed households a choice among ICS. In phase III, we used findings from these pilots to implement a field experiment to rigorously test whether this combination of upgraded supply and demand promotion stimulates adoption. The experiment showed that, compared with zero purchase in control villages, over half of intervention households bought an ICS, although demand was highly price-sensitive. Demand was at least twice as high for electric stoves relative to biomass ICS. Even among households that received a negligible price discount, the upgraded supply chain alone induced a 28 percentage-point increase in ICS ownership. Although the bundled intervention is resource-intensive, the full costs are lower than the social benefits of ICS promotion. Our findings suggest that market analysis, robust supply chains, and price discounts are critical for ICS diffusion.

Jeuland, M.; J.S. Tan-Soo; S.K. Pattanayak (2020). Preferences and the effectiveness of behavior-change interventions: Evidence from adoption of improved cookstoves in India. Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists 7(2), 305-343.

Abstract: Preference heterogeneity can influence behavior in economically significant ways, thereby influencing the effectiveness of environmental policies or interventions. We test this hypothesis in the context of efficient cooking technology in India. We use stated preference methods to first characterize household tastes for various features of a more efficient cooking technology. We then relate these typically unobserved preferences to households’ adoption decisions during an experiment that allowed them to choose between two alternatives with different features. Stated preferences help predict actual adoption: households initially classified as uninterested are less likely to purchase and use any new technology, while relative distaste for pollution is linked to selection of a cleaner technology. Because of this influence on adoption behaviors, preference heterogeneity has important implications for how environmental policies can impact various health and development outcomes.

Brooks, N.; V. Bhojvaid; M. Jeuland; J. Lewis; O. Patange; S. Pattanayak (2016). How much do alternative cookstoves reduce biomass fuel use? Evidence from North India. Resource and Energy Economics, 43, 153-171..

Abstract:Despite widespread global efforts to promote clean cookstoves to achieve improvements in air and forest quality, and to reduce global climate change, surprisingly little is known about the degree to which these actually reduce biomass fuel consumption in real-world settings. Using data from in-house weighing of fuel conducted in rural India, we examine the impact of cleaner cookstoves – most of which are LPG stoves – on three key outcomes related to solid fuel use. Our results suggest that using a clean cookstove is associated with daily reductions of about 4.5 kg of biomass fuel, 160 fewer minutes cooking on traditional stoves, and 105 fewer minutes collecting biomass fuels. These findings of substantial savings are robust to the use of estimators with varying levels of control for selection, and to alternative data obtained from household self-reports. Our results support the idea that efforts to promote clean stoves among poor rural households can reduce solid fuel use and cooking time, and that rebound effects toward greater amounts of cooking on multiple stoves are not sufficient to eliminate these gains. We also find, however, that households who have greater wealth, fewer members, are in less marginalized groups, and practice other health-averting behaviors, are more likely to use these cleaner stoves, which suggests that socio-economic status plays an important role in determining who benefits from such technologies. Future efforts to capture social benefits must therefore consider how to promote the use of alternative technologies by poor households, given that these households are least likely to own clean stoves.

Lewis, J.; V. Bhojvaid; N. Brooks; I. Das; M. Jeuland; O. Patange, S.K. Pattanayak (2015). Piloting improved cookstoves in India. Journal of health communication, 20(sup1), 28-42.

Abstract: Despite the potential of improved cookstoves to reduce the adverse environmental and health impacts of solid fuel use, their adoption and use remains low. Social marketing—with its focus on the marketing mix of promotion, product, price, and place—offers a useful way to understand household behaviors and design campaigns to change biomass fuel use. We report on a series of pilots across 3 Indian states that use different combinations of the marketing mix. We find sales varying from 0% to 60%. Behavior change promotion that combined door-to-door personalized demonstrations with information pamphlets was effective. When given a choice amongst products, households strongly preferred an electric stove over improved biomass-burning options. Among different stove attributes, reduced cooking time was considered most valuable by those adopting a new stove. Households clearly identified price as a significant barrier to adoption, while provision of discounts (e.g., rebates given if households used the stove) or payments in installments were related to higher purchase. Place-based factors such as remoteness and nongovernmental organization operations significantly affected the ability to supply and convince households to buy and use improved cookstoves. Collectively, these pilots point to the importance of continued and extensive testing of messages, pricing models, and different stove types before scale-up. Thus, we caution that a one-size-fits-all approach will not boost improved cookstove adoption.

Jeuland, M.; V Bhojvaid; A Kar; J. Lewis; O. Patange; S. Pattanayak; N Ramanathan; I. Rehman; J. Tan Soo; V. Ramanathan (2015). Preferences for improved cook stoves: Evidence from rural villages in north India. Energy Economics, 52, 287-298.

Abstract: Because emissions from solid fuel burning in traditional stoves impact global climate change, the regional environment, and household health, there is today real interest in improved cook stoves (ICS). Nonetheless, surprisingly little is known about what households like about these energy products. We report on preferences for biomass-burning ICS attributes in a large sample of 2120 rural households in north India, a global hotspot for biomass fuel use and the damages that such use entails. Households have a strong baseline reliance and preference for traditional stoves, a preference that outweighs the $10 and $5 willingness to pay (WTP) for realistic (33%) reductions in smoke emissions and fuel needs on average, respectively. Preferences for stove attributes are also highly varied, and correlated with a number of household characteristics (e.g. expenditures, gender of household head, patience and risk preferences). These results suggest that households exhibit cautious interest in some aspects of ICS, but that widespread adoption is unlikely because many households appear to prefer traditional stoves over ICS with similar characteristics. The policy community must therefore support a reinvigorated supply chain with complementary infrastructure investments, foster experimentation with products, encourage continued applied research and knowledge generation, and provide appropriate incentives to consumers, if ICS distribution is to be scaled up.

Bhojvaid, V.; M. Jeuland, A. Kar; J. Lewis; S. Pattanayak; N. Ramanathan; V. Ramanathan; I. Rehman (2014). “How do people in rural India perceive improved stoves and clean fuel? Evidence from Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 11(2), 1341-1358.

Abstract: Improved cook stoves (ICS) have been widely touted for their potential to deliver the triple benefits of improved household health and time savings, reduced deforestation and local environmental degradation, and reduced emissions of black carbon, a significant short-term contributor to global climate change. Yet diffusion of ICS technologies among potential users in many low-income settings, including India, remains slow, despite decades of promotion. This paper explores the variation in perceptions of and preferences for ICS in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, as revealed through a series of semi-structured focus groups and interviews from 11 rural villages or hamlets. We find cautious interest in new ICS technologies, and observe that preferences for ICS are positively related to perceptions of health and time savings. Other respondent and community characteristics, e.g., gender, education, prior experience with clean stoves and institutions promoting similar technologies, and social norms as perceived through the actions of neighbours, also appear important. Though they cannot be considered representative, our results suggest that efforts to increase adoption and use of ICS in rural India will likely require a combination of supply-chain improvements and carefully designed social marketing and promotion campaigns, and possibly incentives, to reduce the up-front cost of stoves.