[Stoves] How Results Based Financing is spurring solar market development in Tanzania

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Christina

 

>Its a good first step to testing something for larger scale, but funders will want to see that their investment is having an impact and fuel stacking will continue to provide problems for us in the cookstoves sector.

The critical things seems to be that program funders what to know that they are getting what they are paying for. It has been a concern to me that most lab tests don’t predict what the stove will do, yet they are almost always used to ‘select stoves’.  After that, they are promoted there is only some field checking.  We call that ‘picking winners’. A ‘winner’ is the lucky product that gets promoted. Often behind that promotion is a claim that ‘this is the best stove’ based on numbers that are not typical of what is going to happen in the field.  We have to be practical about this. The idea that there is a ‘best stove’ is alive and well, yet the best is different in different circumstances. That is why we are doing ‘contextual testing’.

The first thing to do is not to ‘pick winners’. The screening should be something like, ‘remove from the candidate list everything that is not worth promoting as far as we are concerned’ which in the case of the CSI is anything that does not get one star in each category of PM, CO and fuel consumption. Depending on how picky you are, you might end up with one or five products. You have to test and see.  High altitude stoves burning dry, woody biomass (bushes) will be quite different from stoves burning damp wood in the Congo.

But performing that elimination round means having some clue what people are burning and what they are going to do with the stoves. You can’t pick a stove ‘in absentia’. If you want low PM, you have to test them using the fuels and burn cycle people are going to use because the PM production is strongly affected by the fuel. Some stoves are designed to burn particular fuels (well, hopefully that are) and they should perform much better than stoves that aren’t.

What this means is that there must be foreknowledge of the community before one picks or ranks stoves to perform there.

>We are getting ready to do SUMs and an adoption study here in Guatemala with LPG, but most of the households are adopting pressure cookers, so it will be interesting to see if we have lots of fuel stacking with the pressure cooker.

Do you mean people are going to be using LPG for a pressure cooker and then wood for something else? I want to be clear if you consider stove stacking and fuel stacking as separate things, then how do you count that in your surveying?

What do people cook in a pressure cooker, and what effect does it have on fuel consumption? 

Cecil Cook is very clear there should be a period of re-selection (viewing the lab tests as ‘pre-selection’ or ‘winnowing’) that involves focus groups. Focus group composition is very important. Being a random person does not necessarily make one a good focus group member.

A difficulty we faced with the CSI Pilot is that people have several stoves and replacing one of them does not mean they use the new one only. We have to accept (and hope) that eventually all will be replaced with improved products. How are you going to deal with that? Do people have multiple stoves, burners, rice cookers etc that they use every week?

Thanks
Crispin

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