# **3 Access to Im roved Cookin Technolo ies** **<u>p g g</u>**

## **3.1 Describing the interventions**

**Improved cookstoves have the potential to reduce indoor air pollution, improve the health of women and children, and cut time spent collecting fuelwood. However, penetration remains very low everywhere except in China, and few studies exist that identify the barriers to greater uptake.**

The definition of an improved stove depends on: (i) type of traditional stove, (ii) aim of the design improvement, and (iii) affordability. Here we draw on a summary provided by a recent World Bank (2011) report. ―Traditional cookstoves can range from three-stone open fires to substantial brick-and-mortar models and ones with chimneys. An improved stove can be designed to improve energy efficiency, remove smoke from the indoor living space, or lessen the drudgery of cooking duties. In the early stages of most improved stove programs, many models were designed so that even the poorest customers could afford them. Valued at about US$5 or less, these cookstoves represented an improvement over a threestone open fire; nonetheless, they were rudimentary devices. Today there is growing sentiment to support a wider variety of more refined cookstoves, which are sometimes more expensive. Given the many cookstoves used by rural and urban populations in developing countries, improvements can differ markedly by country or region. Thus, ―improved cookstove‖ is an umbrella term encompassing an array of diverse cookstoves. Only China has a high percentage of households that have adopted better cookstoves, at about 40 percent, while adoption in the other regions generally has ranged between 5 and 10 percent.‖ Socio-cultural barriers prevent many women from accessing and using improved stoves and clean fuels. Thus, any evaluation of the impacts of such access and use must account for these barriers – either through some feature of the quasi-experimental design or by including proxies (e.g., relative power and or education of woman), of these barriers in multivariate regressions.

How might these technologies and associated choices differentially impact women? The most plausible impacts are on the health of women and children, largely from reduced indoor air pollution, and time savings in fuelwood collection. Cooking with biomass results in indoor-air pollution (IAP) that causes a variety of respiratory illnesses such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma, bronchitis, and pneumonia (Bruce et al., 2006). Because cooking and fuelwood collection are time intensive activities, technological efficiencies could generate savings in time spent cooking and collecting fuelwood that would, presumably, mainly benefit women. As discussed in Section 1.2.2, one would assume that a technology that relaxes women‘s time constraint will release time that will be gainfully employed in other welfare enhancing behaviors such as income generation, education (especially for school-aged girls) and leisure. This in turn could empower women within households and communities. However, even if these gains are realized, there may be no gender differentiated gains for women relative to men. For example, most households who use biomass for cooking typically live in 1 or 2 room houses. Thus, even if the woman cook bears the brunt of the IAP exposure, men in the same houses are exposed to a high level of IAP because they are often inside the same confined unventilated home during the peak cooking hours in the early mornings and evenings.

## **3.2 Welfare implications**

**The literature on the health impacts of household energy interventions is reasonably robust, best highlighted by a recent meta-analysis of 25 studies (Dherani et al., 2008), which shows that cooking with biomass (compared to cooking with clean fuels or improved stoves) increases the risk of pneumonia by 80%.**

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