A few weeks ago, newspapers around the country reported on an issue
that hardly ever makes its way to the forefront of public consciousness:
clean cookstoves for the poor. Several popular blogs ran reprints of
the newspaper articles, most of them featuring reader comments that were
unapologetically and almost uniformly vilifying in their condemnation
of what many see as the government’s latest display of ineptitude and
wastefulness.
The crux of the story is that the Federal Executive
Council suddenly announced plans to import clean cookstove components
and ‘wonderbags’ for free distribution to ‘poor rural women’ with the
colossal sum of N9.2 billion – and this is for the first phase alone. By
the time the ‘aggressive’ scheme winds up five years from now, the
project is expected to have spent tens of billions more procuring a
total of 20 million cookstoves for poor households nationwide.
Notwithstanding the public sentiments alleging subterfuge and foul
play, it is indeed the case that the poor rural women targeted by the
scheme often cook over basic wood stoves that endanger their health and
that of their families as well as pollute their immediate environment.
There are other accompanying hazards: firewood fetching mostly falls to
women and girls, exerting a physical toll on them and often narrowing
their chances for self-improvement by encroaching on their productive
and schooling time.
The subject of cookstoves is an important one, even
if it is one that seems inconsequential – or as one commentator put it, ‘non-essential’
– to people in certain classes. Clean cookstoves (which are not to be
confused with kerosene stoves, as many commentators seem to have done),
deployed under the right conditions, can help to address some of the
social and environmental ills highlighted above. At about N12,000 per
unit, the stoves procured by the FEC are probably higher-grade varieties
that can deliver substantial firewood savings and/or smoke reductions
to users. Nonetheless, there are many as-yet unresolved issues
surrounding clean cookstove acquisition and use that have historically
rendered their potential benefits elusive.
One such issue is a longstanding dilemma on the global cookstoves
scene over the merits of distributing stoves freely or at subsidised
rates to poor people versus offering them at full price on the open
market, just like most other commodities. Over the past ten or so years,
the global cookstoves community has been leaning more and more toward
the open market approach, following a plethora of free/subsidised
cookstove programmes that were widely regarded as disasters. One of the
most widely criticised stove subsidy debacles is a national scheme
launched by the Indian government a good three decades ago, in which
nearly 30 million stoves were distributed over a twenty-year period with
subsidy rates as high as 75% for the poorest households.
The premise of the current FEC project ‘to engender [a] clean cooking
culture’ in cookstove recipients echoes that of the discredited Indian
project to stimulate long-term demand for clean cooking solutions among
the rural poor. The Indian example, however, delivered a striking
lesson: people who got the heavily subsidised stoves were not willing to
replace them at full market price when they broke down after a few
years. No clean cooking culture engendered there, alas. While examples
like this do not automatically signal a triumph of the increasingly
favoured market approach, they do highlight the failure of even
well-meaning promoters to identify the base conditions for the success
of cookstove initiatives.
Rather confusingly, the FEC project looks set to flout the important
lessons that have been demonstrated several times over by cookstove
programmes around the world. Experience has shown that such programmes
need to take their inspiration from the social, cultural and economic
realities of poor people to have a chance at succeeding.
This requires
promoters to ask and answer some fundamental questions before going into
poor communities: Why do people use the stoves they do now? Do they see
any reason to change these stoves? If yes, what would they like a new
stove to do for them? How would they get the fuel to power the stoves?
How does the cost of running the new stoves compare with current costs,
and how would this impact their willingness to switch?
Further, how compatible are the new stoves with the food types,
cooking patterns, and broader lifestyles of users? (As one Facebook
commenter pointed out, albeit jokingly, the slow-cooking function of the
wonderbag may overshadow its energy-saving properties in households
where people need to eat breakfast early before going out for the day.)
What about maintenance and repair, particularly for those in remote
areas? Crucially, as in the Indian case, when the stoves invariably get
spoilt beyond repair and need to be replaced – what then? Will poor
rural women be willing or able to replace the stoves themselves, or does
the project intend to keep supplying the stoves infinitely? It should
be noted that many of these questions would apply even if the stoves
were to be mass-produced locally and sold on the open market, as some
commentators have suggested.
One of the most interesting themes to emerge from media reports of
the FEC scheme and the barrage of comments on them is that many people
say they don’t need cleaner cookstoves, or at least that they don’t need
government to hand such stoves to them freely. While this general
reaction partly reflects societal attitudes that relegate stoves to the
domain of women in the home, it brings to the fore some of the things
that citizens (including poor rural women) believe are vastly more
fundamental to their well-being: better nutrition, affordable and
accessible cooking fuels, improved infrastructure, security, healthcare,
jobs for young people, and access to credit for small business owners.
The overall message here is consistent with what I’ve found in my own
research on energy poverty, that clean cookstoves do not feature
prominently on the priority lists of many poor people.
If this is the case, how does a project like the FEC scheme, detached
as it is from the everyday experiences and expectations of the poor
rural women it purports to be so concerned about, hope to establish and
sustain the clean cooking culture it is so lavishly trying to promote?
Part of the answer lies in the kind of research that my centre at the University of Ibadan and a few other African universities are currently collaborating on, with leadership provided by the University of Nottingham.
Our research is asking precisely the sorts of questions raised above in
other African contexts, in a bid to identify barriers to the use of
clean cookstoves and possibly arrive at strategies for addressing some
of those barriers. It is slow-going, painstaking work, but it offers the
best chance of eventually making any real impact on those who stand to
benefit the most from using clean cookstoves on a sustainable basis.
Perhaps the FEC could borrow a leaf from this?
Dr. Temilade Sesan is an associate lecturer in renewable
energy policy at the Centre for Petroleum, Energy Economics and Law,
University of Ibadan.
Etisalat
