[Stoves] SPAM: Where's the win? (question from ETHOS)

[Erin Rasmussen]

Hi Marc, 

I wasn't in the health session, but as I recall, when Nordica talked about the Nathan Johnson's findings, there were several brief responses that suggested possible causes, which I'm noting here in no particular order 

 - stove stacking 

 - an improved stove meant that tasks that would otherwise be deferred due to lack of fuel could now be accomplished, so fuel use in cooking may have gone down but other fuel use may have gone up

-  user adoption of the stove may have dropped off over time 

 - the stove may not have been suitable for all of the cooking tasks that the village needed

- Mark Bryden said that the paper contained some good detailed analysis of the topic and suggested that people read it. 

 

The conversation reminded me quite a bit about the conversation in 2013 about village energy.  To oversimplify the conversation from that year: Sometimes, the energy problem that the village needs to solve isn't a cooking problem, and it may help to partner with groups that can offer a suite of solutions rather than just a cooking solution.   

 

VJ also noted that in Haiti - when they only gave out one improved stove (with one burner) there was a lot of stove stacking and a return to traditional cooking methods because most people cooked dishes that required to pots to be cooking simultaneously. He noted that when they gave out 2 stoves, then the adoption of the improved stoves increased dramatically because the people that were cooking had the 2 'burners' that were needed to accomplish cooking tasks.  

 

So that gets us back to the perennial point that people buy products because they solve a problem.  If you can understand the consumer, and solve their problems, and do it in a way that works for them, and is culturally approved, provide marketing, positive reinforcement, and local technical and cooking support, then you're more likely to have a successful stoves program.  (That's a brief summary of the presentation by Praveen Kumar where they looked at successful and unsuccessful stove adoption programs in two villages in India where most other factors were the same). 

 

My notes are hand scribbled and sprawled over several pages. I encourage others to chime in with corrections,

Erin Rasmussen

erin at trmiles.com

 

From: Stoves [mailto:stoves-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org] On Behalf Of Marc-Antoine Pare
Sent: Monday, January 26, 2015 9:19 PM
To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
Subject: SPAM: [Stoves] Where's the win? (question from ETHOS)

 

"Where's the win?" was the best audience question I heard at ETHOS this year.

 

The audience member was asking a panel to provide example of clear wins from stove project implementations.

 

In particular, this panel was about health impacts.

 

The whole room had trouble answering the question. 

 

Partly, this was because a number of the presenters had shown evidence of the great difficulty of stove adoption in practice. Nordica Macarty had a quote from Dr. Nathan Johnson's findings in a Malawai community:

 

"Analysis indicated that cookstove type may affect fuel consumption but the effect was not statistically significant."

 

I'm sure there are good answers to this question out there. Does anyone on the list have any to share? I was really surprised that people at ETHOS didn't have a list to spin off at the tip of their tongues.

 

Marc Paré

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20150127/0f16e59b/attachment.html>