[Stoves] Stove costs

[Erin Rasmussen]

Dear Cecil, 

 

Thank you so much for your thoughtful analysis. I also posted a copy to the
bioenergylists.org web site, along with a link to the full report on the
ProBec site.

http://bioenergylists.org/en/content/stove-costs-zambia

 

It's probably no surprise that the local tinsmith that churns out ordinary
mbaula stoves from whatever local scrap is available has the sympathetic
"vote" from the poor people of Lusaka. The product is probably perceived as
perfectly fine, and chances are that the producer is a
friend/colleague/one-of-us and they are hoping to help keep them in the
local ecology of the their community. 

 

I wonder if that community would be more interested in a local tinsmith that
produces a Peko Pe stove, or may be sympathetically inclined toward
ownership of an improved stove that is made by the same local person out of
similar materials that they are used to seeing in a stove.  But that's pure
armchair speculation on my part. 

 

Kind regards,

Erin Rasmussen

erin at trmiles.com

 

 

From: stoves-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org
[mailto:stoves-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org] On Behalf Of Cecil Cook
Sent: Saturday, November 19, 2011 12:25 AM
To: Crispin Pemberton-Pigott
Cc: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
Subject: Re: [Stoves] Stove costs

 

Dear Crispin and Jan,

 

Here are three partial unpublished reports and one aggregate table that I
put together for GTZ as a valiant effort by an anthropologist to to turn a
small sample of face to face interviews into a meaningfully differentiated
model of the charcoal stove economy of Lusaka.  

 

Maybe it will illuminate some of the proverbial and continuing difficulties
encountered by 'expensive' improved stoves to gain and hold on to a
significant share of a local stove market that is dominated by crappy but
very low cost stoves made by artisans.  

 

The TV and cell phone examples given by Crispin do not 'ring' completely
true for the bottom 2/3rds of the Lusaka charcoal stove market because there
poor people buy the best lowest cost phones and TV's that are on the market.
So the principle is the same: poor people purchase the lowest cost stove
technology on the market. Yes, it is possible for them by heroic feats of
self denial to save enough money to purchase a $25 to $50 cell phone or even
a more expensive TV, but if there was a cell phone or a TV on the market
that cost less and still functioned adequately they would surely buy the
lowest cost technology that gets the job done.  

 

What I discovered and tried to establish in this study was that low income
people who live and die according to how well they manage their daily cash
flows can as a rule only manage to save about 20% of their daily cash flow
over a 7 day period so the amount of money a household can save in a week
pretty determines the upper limit of how much they are willing/able to spend
to buy the least expensive functional charcoal stove on the market.  

 

In search,

 

Cecil Cook

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