[Stoves] Who are "the sort of people we normally think would benefit from improved stoves"? (Re: Andrew)

Tue Jun 13 10:35:10 CDT 2017

Cecil:

Please have a look at the chart below.

What would you like added to that differentiation?

To me it make sense to produce such a chart.

Putting proposed solutions onto your spider chart of suitability with one per column of ‘interest’ would give a visual way to spot ‘best fits’.

I think your list may be different divided. Malgorzata would agree, and it would serve as a ‘good start’ on a goal list for early investigation/characterisation of a community.

Regards
Crispin

Andrew:

First of all, you (or anybody else here) should see my jibes as personal insults. Please, please, please. Otherwise I will be forced to take offense and make you feel guilty!

I am as guilty of seeking moral gratification as my mother - or many a mother - in maintaining her kitchen, her home, and feeding the family.

I meant micro-economics, in particular consumer economics; by extension, home economics and housing economics.

Just what exactly did "we" ever mean by "the sort of people we normally think would benefit from improved stoves"?

Borrowing a line from myself, "These cooks are our customers, not "beneficiaries" of our expertise and charity, and definitely not our "study objects" to be analyzed and reported in silly peer-reviewed jargon in miscarriage of intelligence."

In milder language, we have failed in understanding cooks and cooking. You know my usual litany of complaints -- obsession with physics (energy efficiency, to save trees or crop/animal waste), reduction of cooking to stoves and then stoves to oxidation, reduction of  people to different types of oxidation and air exchange machines.

In the specific case here of solar thermal, if we only strayed out of our typical characterization of these customers as "poor households" with some generic and unchanging cooking tasks that some "integrated" cooking solution had to meet, we would be going after customers differently, by tailoring our products to their habits and wants.

We are prone to desperation and seeking magical solutions we can market. Here, I have in front of me a book "Cleaner Hearths, Better Homes" - New Stoves for India and the Developing World by Douglas F. Barnes, Priti Kumar, and Keith Openshaw. It came out in 2012, just around when EPA shoved the International Workshop Agreement through and ushered in a new age of, um, "clean cookstoves".

I liked the book's title -- instead of mere "improved", it used the word "cleaner" (not "truly health protective" a la Kirk Smith) but more importantly, "Better Homes", an expansive though imprecise term that recognizes the "human environment". (For space heating and such, this can be a critical recognition. Simply recognizing population growth, migration, and new household formation plus residential construction would give us a better definition of "stove".)

The book has a nice 8-page middle section -- an insert, almost -- describing first, second, third generation stoves around some parts of the world and also "modern fuels and stoves".

It was an advocacy piece for the Indian Advanced Biomass Stove program - perhaps the first, and the only, but failed, attempt to move "stoves" from "poor rural households" gambit. As the authors remark under "The Value of Better Stoves" (p. 5) "Entrepreneurs of better stoves have generally avoided serving rural markets".

Barnes had done both urban and rural household energy surveys and had recognized the importance of "different stoves for different folks", at least beginning with the rural/urban divide. The book discusses a vector of "benefits" - in the economic sense, not as individual private gains from a public investment project.

We have all theorized about such "benefits" and some have gone through overly elaborate maniacal methods for quantification, but we simply have not even begun to characterize the customers beyond urban/rural households.

To me, "household" is a census category, a legal term, of limited relevance to the market for cooking. (I hold that at least a half the inanimate energy expenditure in food and beverages happens outside the household. I don't do surveys, though.) What if we made a table like below?

Customer class, size

Location (districts, agroclimatic zones)

Desired attributes

There could be 20 to 200 rows per country. Even the columns need further segmentation -- at least seven desired attributes, three or four locational identifiers, different definitions of customer class (some serving as a proxy for type of cuisine or operating practices).

The point, simply, is that we have not done the economic geography of our market and a SWOT analysis to see where even five million stoves can be sold and USED for five years.

The Indian Advanced Biomass Stove Program didn't do that either. It was an academic exercise from high above, and some bureaucrat got excited for a while. The end was rather ignominious, as you might remember from the Caravaan magazine story in 2015 - Up in Smoke.

I am sure the academics and bureaucrats behind the program had no skin in the game. They spent the money and moved on.

If I get into electoral politics, do you think I can say one sensible and hopeful thing about "better stoves" to poor households? Not if I wanted to promise anything.

Nikhil
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Nikhil Desai

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