[Stoves] SPAM: Re: Offtopic: Malawi and responsibility (Andrew, Roger)

Tom Miles tmiles at trmiles.com
Sun Dec 11 13:06:05 CST 2016


The focus on indoor air quality (IAQ) in 2000 led to several benefits. You may argue with approaches, methods, outcomes and who has benefited, but the level of activity in improved cooking and health has increased substantially.  Research and development has broadened to include the whole living environment - the space, ventilation, fuels, devices and how they are operated. Tools for monitoring impacts on cooks and others moving round the space have improved. Design, construction, use and performance data has been better documented. Beneficiaries have increased from thousands to millions. (Remember when 10,000 stoves was a very big number? It still is for an individual program.) Indoor air quality has been the primary driver for funding.  

 

The challenges and accomplishments have changed substantially since my first experience with three stone fires more than 50 years ago. We fumbled with improving stoves in the 70s but applying good combustion principles led to some of the designs that are still in use today. There was a productive round of activity in the 80s (Eindhoven, VITA etc.) after which donor agencies like USAID tired of funding projects that seemed to have no visible outcome. GIZ seemed to lead the way with food security as a goal in the 1990s. The health focus from 2000 on has led to substantial funding beyond anything before then. There will always be successes and failures. (Since 2000 a peri-urban family in a developing country has probably gone through several stoves, sometimes abandoning the rusted LPG stove for a biomass stove they can fire with free fuel.) While improvements and stove production during the last 15 years has increased the world has experienced substantial increases in poverty, land degradation – diminished access to biomass fuels- and urbanization. According to the World Bank more than 84% of the extreme poor (788 million people) are in Subsaharan Africa and South Asia. When 4 out of 10 people (389 million in Subsaharan Africa) are desperate and probably in urban settings it’s a tough development environment. For a health program deploying improved cooking devices this speaks to a multi-tiered development strategy where different devices are developed to meet different needs. There are opportunities for improvement in every aspect of household energy.  

 

There is a tendency on lists like this to want to make broad pronouncements and sweeping changes. We make better use of the talent and experience in this community when we focus on practical solutions for clearly identifiable problems that we can influence.   

 

Tom        

 

From: Stoves [mailto:stoves-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Heggie
Sent: Sunday, December 11, 2016 6:53 AM
To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Subject: SPAM: Re: [Stoves] Offtopic: Malawi and responsibility (Andrew, Roger)

 

 

 

On 11 December 2016 at 14:00, <cec1863 at gmail.com <mailto:cec1863 at gmail.com> > wrote:

 

 

Until the dispersed virtual stove community ‎of experts and practitioners gets desperate enough to overcome it's present disunity and agree on metrics and standards, the clever priesthood of stoves and their tribal rulers will remain large and in charge: "Stovers of the world unite.....we have nothing to loss but our powerlessness!"

 

Cecil

I like the analogy but Orwell's book, Animal Farm, suggests that after the  war to displace the authoritarian regime and the incomers have fought each other for succession then the new ruling class become their own despots with equally  unwieldy and unequal  regimes.

Real life suggests this has been so for various revolutions.

Education strikes me as being the way forward and we may be nearing halfway to that in UK, and I can vouch for the fact that petty corruption and nepotism thrive here.


 

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