[Stoves] Stove costs

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Jan and AD

I agree with the standard of living and $2 per day. The number is often used
to raise funds to help people. It sounds like very little when a Starbucks
Fairtrade coffee is $4.

It is more important when assessing the cost of a stove (apart from all the
good things Cecil pointed out) to know what the opportunity cost is for the
better stove. What else can be purchased with the money. $2 goes a long way
in China. There are people living in Northern Namibia who barely know what
money is, let alone earn any. One of the four babies in the recent movie
"Babies" is from that group. They got along fine for thousands of years
without any.

Something quite different to watch for is raw material availability.
Proposing that a stove be improved by using twice as much metal (to make
skirts and stove bodies) may be using up a small local supply of second hand
materials. Whatever the cost, there is simply not enough material in some
communities. Mali is a good example. Roger Samson has been teaching stove
making in SE Senegal (and found a wife there!) and there is a similar
limitation. Production is limited by the number of scrap refrigerators they
can find because that is the source of metal.

To bring in new metal to make enough stoves to 'solve the problem' means
addressing the issues of importing and delivering substantial quantities of
new raw material. One approach which I hope to try this year is importing
components instead of raw material, where those components are prepared
under lost cost conditions near the source of supply. Ashok Gadgil is doing
this in Darfur, being able overcome the lack of skills on the ground in the
target area, the efficiency of production of flat parts (in India) and the
cost of Indian steel. Instead of shipping 'scrap' along with un-proceeds
parts (in other words, flat sheets) they only send the parts (flat) which is
transport-efficient and externalises all the accuracy, design drift and
tooling issues.

His project can in theory be scaled to solve the entire problem whereas
depending on local scrap cannot is nearly every location I can think of.

It is an interesting challenge.
Regards
Crispin

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Dear Jan,
In the part of India where I live, a person earning US$ 2 per day would not
be considered all that poor. He would not be able to support a family on
that earning but if he were leading a bachelor's life in a village, he can
live comfortably on that money. The field assistants in our own institute
earn a salary of about US$60 per month. They are farmers' sons. So they have
a roof on their heads and get enough to eat. The salary that they earn is
spent on flashy clothing, cinema, a mobile phone etc.  It is the exchange
rate between the Indian Rupee and the US$ that makes us so poor in the eyes
of the world. I myself, who headed the Institute till my retirement last
month, earned a monthly salary of only US$350, and yet I belonged to the
richest 3% of the country (that is the percentage of people who pay income
tax).
Yours
A.D.Karve