As India's improved cook stoves program gains traction as a result of the efforts of government, stove manufacturers, global foundations and NGOs, the issue is getting focussed on a few basic challenges : Selling the Idea, Finding the Funds, Providing the Support, says a report "Better Burning, Better Breathing: Improving Health with Cleaner Cook Stoves" by Tina Adler in Environmental Health Perspectives.This echoes the Three As that Shell Foundation is seeking to address through its Room to Breath Campaign, namely Awareness, Availability and Affordability .
According to Adler's report, the main objective of Indian consumers who purchase an improved cook stove is often quite different from the Indian government’s reason for promoting stoves. The government wants to improve the health of rural Indians. “But people buy [stoves] more for aspirational reasons,” says Mahesh Yagnaraman, CEO and managing director of First Energy. The energy-efficient stoves burn less, or burn different fuels, so women and children spend less time gathering solid fuel. As part of its original sales campaign, First Energy had doctors test the breathing capacity of interested customers to demonstrate how the old stoves had harmed their lungs. But instead of wanting a new stove, the prospective customers “just wanted medicine,” Yagnaraman says.
To sell stoves, you have to explain how the stoves save time and fuel and don’t dirty the kitchen with soot, says Anchan. Selling improved stoves is “very difficult,” he says. Consumers know the smoke irritates their eyes and makes them cough, but they don’t always comprehend the long-term impact of breathing high levels of smoke.
Customers “don’t trust any of these [stove] solutions very easily,” says Yagnaraman. No stove is entirely reliable, so some families will keep more than one type of stove in their homes, he says. Usage studies show that families cook at most about 70% of their meals on their improved cook stove, says Smith. In their studies, he and his colleagues attach microchip usage monitors to stoves instead of relying on self-reports from the family members. “If you ask people, they say, ‘Oh yes, we love it, we use it all the time,’” Smith says.
Significant customer support is key to any cook stove program’s success, experts say. “You can’t drop a stove into a household and walk away,” notes Rita Colwell, a public health expert at the University of Maryland at College Park and the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. Envirofit provides that hands-on care, Anchan says. In addition to training customers how to use the stove and providing them with a manual, Envirofit calls customers to see how the stove is working for them.
Equally compelling is the issue of working up an industry where the cook stoves actually make a significant difference. Notes Adler, data from studies such as RESPIRE will help answer an important question facing clean-stove advocates and public health experts: how much must concentrations of smoke in homes be reduced in order to improve families’ health? When tested in the field, few of the improved cook stoves used in India achieve more than a 50–60% reduction in indoor air pollution levels and a 50% reduction in fuel use, says Simon Bishop, policy and communications manager at the Shell Foundation, which promotes improved cook stoves as a primary solution to indoor air pollution.
The full feature, Better Burning, Better Breathing: Improving Health with Cleaner Cook Stoves
