[Stoves] re stove cost

Crispin Pemberton-Pigott crispinpigott at gmail.com
Tue Nov 22 23:24:56 CST 2011


Dear Paal

 

I have been too overloaded to answer you email of last weekend and it is
already 10 days later, but you mentioned something that is related to that
post:

 

"What are the obstacles to carry out such a program to almost no cost?"

 

I feel that to really get a broad acceptance of several useful technologies
that should be part of basic science education from the age of about 10.
Many children will not complete primary school so we need to get to them
before they reach grade 5. In Swaziland, like many countries, primary
education includes basic animal husbandry (knowing when a goat is pregnant
etc etc).

 

There are several technologies that have to do with clean(er) living
including simple stoves, water filters, crop shelling and storage - it is a
long list but not an impossible one at all.

 

There is a place for very simple stoves. There is a place for more complex
and more expensive stoves. We are not in a position to live other people's
lives for them so our role is to show what is possible.

 

The primary school syllabus is the right place to introduce these things. It
is unfortunate that those who prepare them feel that the whole of humanity
is about to get connected to a power supply like they are, or like they wish
to be.

 

Cecil and I often found that the people most resistant to intermediate or
appropriate technologies are high level politicians who do not want to be
seen 'bring backward things' to 'their people'. The same resistance is also
common in academia. To be seen promoting simple things is to be seen
'keeping people back' even if the benefits are obvious.

 

One way we have dealt effectively with this is to always make sure we offer
a range of technologies and see what people choose to make or buy or
replicate. 

 

It would be unwise to underestimate people's aspirations. We feel that
simple things could save lives and make everyday living a more pleasurable
experience. How many times have people refused to adopt obviously beneficial
technologies or techniques, or for that matter, ideas! The world is a
complicated place.

 

The root problem is lack of education and the syllabus is where changes can
be made. Travelling 'barefoot engineers' have been remarkably successful in
some regions. Informal education classes have been very effective and
spreading better health and farming. When did you hear about a cooking
class? Very rare.

 

Spreading the knowledge of simple stoves can be expensive in the beginning.
It frequently costs more to teach someone to make a stove than the stove is
worth - even ten times more. When you leave things to themselves to develop,
like the briquette production which seems to be flourishing, you get 'design
drift'. Because stoves are far more dimensionally demanding than a briquette
and people do not have equipment or knowledge to test their small changes
for themselves, experience shows that a good stove degenerates after several
replications, one man to the next. This design drift can be countered with
drawings, tools (forms) and publicity. There was a Canadian-funded poster
campaign in Niger that showed how to make an improved stove with pictures
only (people can't read). It was a great idea. There are lots of ways to use
common objects like coins and paper money to show dimensions of parts. 

 

The development of a technology is about 5% of the cost of bringing it at
scale to a population. This is well known.  That is why organisations like
GERES and GIZ and DGIS exist: big donor money to promote at scale.

 

You will find very very few social scientists and marketing people in the
stove community. In fact there are very few industrial designers either,
even though they are the ones trained to turn inventions into acceptable
products. Stove designers (most of the list members) are very occupied with
their designs and functions, not commercial acceptable appearance and
saleability. Stove designers think nothing of asking cooks to change their
fuel preparation habits, their cooking times, their attention requirement,
the effort to maintain or build it. Well, that is perhaps why there are so
many failed stove roll-outs. 

 

Marketing professionals can often look at a stove programme and see
immediately where the problems in the supply chain will be, or the
difficulty of selling a behaviour change. It is a very complicated business
and we need many types of stoves, combustion and sizes - as many as there
are food types. My wife is very miserable if she has no baking oven. It is
her basic demand. As a result we have baked cakes in electric frying pans,
metal boxes and gas ovens, electric ovens with mal-functioning controls.
Werner Schultz in Namibia cooks by placing a stove on top of a cake tin,
with the tin buried in the ground. His stove also makes hot water like the
Jompy does, with a coiled copper pipe near the fire. It is cheap, small,
portable and the one I saw had been used for 30 years. Imagine - all those
features and it still has not caught on.

 

We have a big task ahead of us.

 

Regards

Crispin

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20111123/5f205acd/attachment.html>


More information about the Stoves mailing list