By Doug Barnes
By Doug Barnes
India Traditional Stove: Credit C. Carnemark |
Recently
I participated in a very interesting workshop at Yale University. The workshop
was called The Adoption Gap: Design, Development and Diffusion of Household
Energy Technologies. The focus of the
conference was to examine why improved biomass cooking stoves have not achieved
widespread adoption even after over 25 years of promotion. Many of the
presentations were very innovative. Included among the speakers was Rema Hanna,
who is the author of the controversial study Up in Smoke.
She talked about her well designed stove impact assessment. Unfortunately, the
stove being evaluated was from India's legacy mud stove program, some of which
are still being promoted. Hanna made the valid point that many current programs
are still supporting such stoves. While this is true, today there are many better designed stoves compared to those from
the 1990s (see commentary on the paper). Unfortunately, public monitoring and evaluation
studies of these new stoves are still fairly sparse. The presentations from the
conference are not yet available on line, but I will update this blog once they
become available.
Fortunately
or unfortunately, I am one of a small number of people that have been involved
in improved stove development for almost its entire history. I say fortunately
because it has been a very interesting to observe the evolution of the programs
over the years. I say unfortunately, because even today with the many
innovations taking place, most poor households in developing countries still
use open fires or primitive stoves for cooking.
Also, in many countries well meaning non-governmental organizations are
still promoting the stoves designed in the 1990s.
I
prepared a presentation for the conferences with the title, Improved
Stoves:
What Have We Learned, How Do We Move Forward? The ideas for this presentation were taken from my
recent book Cleaner Hearths, Better
Homes: New Stoves for India and the Developing World. For those interested,
a free digital copy of the book is available, or for those more interested in print, copies can be
purchased online. The book describes
the positive and negative aspects of India's legacy improved stove program that
was abandoned in 2002. This legacy program now is universally criticized, but most
people really don't understand the pros and cons of the old program. Some
aspects of the legacy stove program were quite innovative, including working
with NGOs, including women's groups, assigning technical agencies to evaluate
design issues, and developing commercialization strategies. Many of these
innovations are relevant for the promotion and sale of improved stoves
today.
As
part of my presentation, I had one slide on the development of stove programs.
For those just now becoming interested in the new stoves, this slide provides a
historical overview of the 25 year history of improved stoves. The text below the break is from a glossy
insert in the center of Cleaner Hearths:
Better Homes that was published in 2012. The rest of the book is based on
empirical findings from short questionnaires and focus discussion groups
carried out at the very end of India's program. The book takes a more objective
approach identifying both what went wrong and also positive contributions of
the program for people in India. Anyway, continue after the break to read my short
history of improved stoves.
A Short History of Improved Stoves
A Short History of Improved Stoves
Stoves
have existed since the beginning of human history. They have come in various sizes and styles,
having been adapted to myriad cultures and food preparation methods. As society has progressed, more sophisticated
stove models have been developed.
Today’s modern kitchen reflects the many types of standardized and
specialized cooking devices available, from coffee and tea pots to toasters and
gas cooktops.
In
developing countries, the pattern of stoves development has ranged from
traditional stoves to gas or LPG. Over
the last 30 years, various programs have promoted improved stoves as a bridge
between traditional and modern ones. The
development of better stoves has witnessed several overlapping stages, which
are chronicled below.
Traditional Stoves
Traditional
stoves have been around for thousands of years.
Users often make the stoves, customizing them to preferred cooking
styles. In South
Asia , traditional stoves are commonly made of mud, but many
households use three-stone, open-fire stoves.
It is common practice in South Asia to
use straw, leaves, and dung as cooking fuel.
The outdoor
stove at left is being fed small twigs.
Such fuels require constant attention.
Unless the kitchen is
well-ventilated or the stove is located outdoors, cooks are exposed to massive
amounts of smoke emissions. Even
outdoor stoves may expose cooks to high levels of pollution. Stove efficiency varies widely, depending on
use, ranging from 10 to 20 percent. The indoor stove at the beginning of the blog uses small blocks of
wood. The black substance visible on the back wall is tar, the product of incomplete combustion. Carbon also covers pots and pans, making them
difficult to clean.
The Lorena stove, whose name is derived from mud (lodo)
and sand (arena)—the primary
materials used to make the stove—was originally developed in Guatemala. This picture, taken in the
early 1980s, depicts one of the myriad models developed throughout that
decade. Popularity among Latin America ’s nongovernmental organizations,
governments, and donor agencies increased.
But use of varying sizes and low-quality construction materials reduced
reliability, leading to user dissatisfaction.
Today the Lorena stove is only rarely produced in Latin
America .
Second Generation: Manufactured Components
First
Generation: Custom Built
At the outset, India’s National
Program on Improved Chulhas focused on producing and disseminating stoves that
the poorest households could afford. With
the exception of the chimney, these first-generation stoves were made of mud
and clay, as illustrated by the Parvati stove .
Indentations in the pot opening helped to channel heat around the pan
and prevent smoke from entering the kitchen.
From 1980 until about 2002, hundreds of such models were developed. As one might imagine, with repeated heating
and cooling, these stoves easily cracked and degraded. The estimated two-year life span proved too
optimistic; in practice, most stoves failed within a year.
Rare Photo of Original Lorena Stove by M. Tay. |
Second Generation: Manufactured Components
In the 1990s and early 2000s, the trend to make stoves
of more durable materials also made them more expensive. In India, the Laxmi, like the
first-generation Parvati, was originally made of mud. But in the last years of the National
Program, many stoves were constructed of cement or a mixture of clay and cement, which increased the
cost. With the exception of the
stove pipe, these models were made from prefabricated molds. But the efficacy of this approach was never
proven because, only a few years after adopting it, stove dissemination under
the National Program ended.
Plancha Stove: Credit Fundacion Solar |
Third Generation: Manufactured Stoves