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# **Abandonment of Polluting Fuels**

Abandonment of polluting fuels was examined in the context of adoption of LPG by taking the larger geographical area of the two areas (entire country or urban areas) in which 20 percent or more of the population cited LPG as the primary cooking fuel. There is a trade-off between coverage and representativeness, and the cut-off point of 20 percent was selected as a compromise between the two competing objectives—the lower the threshold level the greater the coverage, but the lower the statistical significance of the data. In the areas so selected, the analysis began with identification of all households using LPG in any capacity, followed by identification of those citing LPG as their primary cooking fuels, and finally those who were not only using LPG but had abandoned all polluting liquid and solid fuels (Figure 9). As mentioned in the study description, abandonment as defined and measured in this study is not confined to cooking and instead represents abandonment of polluting fuels for all household activities. There was considerable variation in the population shares across the areas, ranging from those where only a very small fraction of LPG users had abandoned polluting fuels to those where virtually everyone had abandoned them. The solid blue portion in the figure representing abandonment of polluting fuels varied from 2.6 percent in urban Burkina Faso to 98 percent in Mauritius. Urban Burkina Faso stood out for having a majority of LPG users being incidental users who did not use LPG as the primary cooking fuel. By contrast, in Angola, Gabon, Mauritius, and urban Nigeria, the vast majority of those using LPG at all used it as their primary cooking fuel.

**Figure 9  Breakdown of adoption of LPG: abandonment of polluting fuels, primary use, and all users of LPG**

<!-- Start of picture text --> Primary<br><!-- End of picture text --> _Source_ : World Bank staff calculations using household survey data.

_Note_ : The analysis is confined to those areas—nationally or urban areas—where more than one-fifth of the population lived in households citing LPG as the primary cooking fuel. For the first nine countries, the entire sample is taken because the one-fifth threshold is met nationally. In Burkina Faso, Kenya, and Nigeria, the one-fifth threshold is met only in urban areas. Households abandoning polluting fuels include very few LPG users who did not cite LPG as their primary cooking fuel. However, the sum of abandonment and primary bars in the figure equals the percentage of the total population citing LPG as the primary cooking fuel. Taking Cameroon as an example, the figure shows that 31 percent of the population was using LPG in any capacity, 20 percent of the population cited LPG as the primary cooking fuel, and 7 percent used LPG and no other polluting liquid or solid fuels. Abandonment = percentage of people living in households that used LPG and had abandoned all forms of polluting fuels; primary = percentage of people living in households that cited LPG as their primary cooking fuel but had retained the use of polluting fuels; other users = percentage of people who reported non-zero expenditures on LPG but did not cite it as their primary cooking fuel and had retained the use of polluting fuels; * = urban areas only.