By Doug Barnes
By Doug Barnes
 |
| India Traditional Stove: Credit C. Carnemark |
Recently
I participated in a very interesting workshop at Yale University. The workshop
was called The Adoption Gap: Design, Development and Diffusion of Household
Energy Technologies. The focus of the
conference was to examine why improved biomass cooking stoves have not achieved
widespread adoption even after over 25 years of promotion. Many of the
presentations were very innovative. Included among the speakers was Rema Hanna,
who is the author of the controversial study Up in Smoke.
She talked about her well designed stove impact assessment. Unfortunately, the
stove being evaluated was from India's legacy mud stove program, some of which
are still being promoted. Hanna made the valid point that many current programs
are still supporting such stoves. While this is true, today there are many better designed stoves compared to those from
the 1990s (see commentary on the paper). Unfortunately, public monitoring and evaluation
studies of these new stoves are still fairly sparse. The presentations from the
conference are not yet available on line, but I will update this blog once they
become available.
Fortunately
or unfortunately, I am one of a small number of people that have been involved
in improved stove development for almost its entire history. I say fortunately
because it has been a very interesting to observe the evolution of the programs
over the years. I say unfortunately, because even today with the many
innovations taking place, most poor households in developing countries still
use open fires or primitive stoves for cooking.
Also, in many countries well meaning non-governmental organizations are
still promoting the stoves designed in the 1990s.
I
prepared a presentation for the conferences with the title, Improved
Stoves:
What Have We Learned, How Do We Move Forward? The ideas for this presentation were taken from my
recent book Cleaner Hearths, Better
Homes: New Stoves for India and the Developing World. For those interested,
a free digital copy of the book is available, or for those more interested in print, copies can be
purchased online. The book describes
the positive and negative aspects of India's legacy improved stove program that
was abandoned in 2002. This legacy program now is universally criticized, but most
people really don't understand the pros and cons of the old program. Some
aspects of the legacy stove program were quite innovative, including working
with NGOs, including women's groups, assigning technical agencies to evaluate
design issues, and developing commercialization strategies. Many of these
innovations are relevant for the promotion and sale of improved stoves
today.
As
part of my presentation, I had one slide on the development of stove programs.
For those just now becoming interested in the new stoves, this slide provides a
historical overview of the 25 year history of improved stoves. The text below the break is from a glossy
insert in the center of Cleaner Hearths:
Better Homes that was published in 2012. The rest of the book is based on
empirical findings from short questionnaires and focus discussion groups
carried out at the very end of India's program. The book takes a more objective
approach identifying both what went wrong and also positive contributions of
the program for people in India. Anyway, continue after the break to read my short
history of improved stoves.
