Roughly half of the world’s population burns solid biomass fuels for cooking and heating needs. Throughout poor, rural areas of sub‐Saharan Africa, biomass is the dominant fuel, and cooking is usually performed using a simple three‐stone fire (or “open fire”), in poorly ventilated structures. The inefficient and incomplete combustion of these fuels without good ventilation produces high indoor concentrations of health damaging pollutants including particulate matter and carbon monoxide. The motivation behind introducing biomass cookstoves to the Millennium Villages is to identify appropriate technologies that not only provide a highly efficient combustion (thereby reducing the stress on the environment) but also to do it in a manner that does not deviate a lot from traditional cooking preferences.
Contact Information
As of September, 2010, the Millennium Village Project (MVP) has launched its household biomass stove programs in Millennium Villages (MVs) in Tanzania, Uganda, Nigeria and Senegal. The current plan is to expand the MP improved cookstove program to several additional MVs in other target countries, including Mali, Malawi, and Kenya.
Beyond the initial target market of MVP clusters, the idea is to expand the coverage and distribution of efficient cookstoves to many other locations in the region. Partnerships with lantern manufacturers and distributors will be crucial to facilitating supply chains to the village clusters. As these relationships are established, MP and EI hope to leverage these to expand project activities to additional MVP clusters as well as to partner with the Millennium Cities Initiative (MCI) to expand to neighboring urban and peri‐urban locations.
Our Experience And Interest In The Four PCIA Central Focus Areas
Key Barriers for the MVP programs in Africa:
• The stove distributor must have access to efficient overland transport networks, which is a big challenge in remote regions of Africa, in order to create an effective rural distribution system. • Regional agents or retailers should be aware of the value added tax (or sales tax) for their clients. In many countries this tax rate stands at 15%-20%. However, many countries allow tax exceptions for sales of such products to poor communities through cooperatives or other such groups. This could be a key factor in lowering the final cost of the cookstoves to the consumer. • Creating a system to honor warranties (after sales service) is crucial for long term success of the product. • The ability of the carbon agents to register the project under an acceptable and established protocol is crucial. For compliance markets (CERs), a UNFCCC approved program of activities (POA) is a usual norm. Whereas, for voluntary markets (VERs) registration through gold standard norms is more common. Moreover, monitoring usage, capturing data, aggregate reporting and general program management to receive appropriate carbon credits are essential components for success of the program. • Community acceptance is necessary. In order to ensure this happens, the MVP program works closely with the community leaders and women’s groups as well as uses focus groups, vendor and customer surveys to understand and adapt to community needs.
The core premise of our project is an enterprise-driven approach that spurs entrepreneurship as well as aids in job creation at the local level. The primary source of entrepreneur stimulus and job creation is through the local vendors. An indirect form of job creation is through the local administrative unit and the distribution program. The jobs at the local level will be paid for by the revenue generated by the sales of the stoves. Stoves are chosen based on CCTs under local conditions, and are generally either StoveTec or Envirofit brands of stoves. Pricing is also determined on a country-by-country basis, based on people's willingness to pay, as determined in baseline surveys and market surveys. In Nigeria, for example, StoveTec stoves are sold to the end user at $16.00. In Uganda, Stovetec stoves are sold to the end user at $10.00. The MVP project subsidizes the difference and recognizes the importance of carbon credits for the success of the program and for keeping the acquisition cost at the local levels to a reasonable level. We assume that the upfront subsidy given to the cookstove customers will eventually be recovered through carbon credits.
A key component of designing a successful marketing plan for the cookstoves is the creation of an effective rural distribution network. Our project makes good use of the existing local administrative and entrepreneurial structures to achieve this goal. Our rural distribution plan includes two phases:
Phase 1: The first phase of the project involves seeding the local market with a startup inventory as well as an initial set of local vendors and the establishment of local administrative unit (distributor).
Phase 2: As the market for the cook stoves steadily grows, MVP and its partners continue to build capacity of local institutions. As sales continue, capacity is built among the vendors, the villagers become familiar with the products and MVP gains insight into the demand levels within local cluster populations. Meanwhile, the program recruits new partners and gradually transfers greater responsibility to local institutions and partners.
Before introducing a specific stove to a village the MVP program undertakes rigorous CCTs in each community, asking local women to cook local foods with their own fuel wood and every-day cooking techniques to compare locally made stoves and manufactured stoves against the three stone fire. The results of these tests are compiled and compared. These tests help to determine what stove to introduce into a Millennium Village.
MVP tracks socio-economic benefits to stove users through surveys administered to users at specified time points after purchase. The results of some of these surveys have been published in Energy Policy: "Field testing and survey evaluation of household biomass cookstoves in rural sub-Saharan Africa" and Energy for Sustainable Development "Testing Cookstoves in Rural Kenyan Schools". Both can be found at the Modi Group website: http://modi.mech.columbia.edu/. In addition to surveys, site teams and local energy cooperatives track the number of stoves sold, the buyers and the month that each was sold.
In addition, in July/August, 2010, MVP worked together with Berkeley Air Monitoring on a USAID-funded study: "RAPID ASSESSMENT OF IMPACT OF IMPROVED STOVES ON HOUSEHOLD EMISSIONS" in Ruhiira, Uganda. The resulting data from the study provides the first field assessment in Africa of a stove intervention’s impact on greenhouse gas and health damaging pollutant emissions, which are defined as the quantity or rate of pollutants emitted directly from the stove as a result of combusting fuels.
Relevant Publications or Studies
Edwin Adkins, Jiehua Chen, Jacob Winiecki, Peter Koinei, Vijay Modi. Testing institutional biomass cookstoves in rural Kenyan schools for the Millennium Villages Project. Energy For Sustainable Development. http://modi.mech.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Adkins-cookstov...
Edwin Adkins, Erika Tyler, Jin Wang, David Siriri, Vijay Modi. Field testing and survey evaluation of household biomass cookstoves in rural sub-Saharan Africa. Energy for Sustainable Development. http://www.me.columbia.edu/fac-bios/modi/resources/Adkins_HHstovepaper_9...
Our Contribution to the Partnership
Participate in conferences, events, share results of CCTs and publications, and others.
