Dear Cecil,
Thank you so much for your thoughtful analysis. I also posted a copy to the bioenergylists.org web site, along with a link to the full report on the ProBec site. http://bioenergylists.org/en/content/stove-costs-zambia It's probably no surprise that the local tinsmith that churns out ordinary mbaula stoves from whatever local scrap is available has the sympathetic "vote" from the poor people of Lusaka. The product is probably perceived as perfectly fine, and chances are that the producer is a friend/colleague/one-of-us and they are hoping to help keep them in the local ecology of the their community. I wonder if that community would be more interested in a local tinsmith that produces a Peko Pe stove, or may be sympathetically inclined toward ownership of an improved stove that is made by the same local person out of similar materials that they are used to seeing in a stove. But that's pure armchair speculation on my part. Kind regards, Erin Rasmussen [email protected] From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Cecil Cook Sent: Saturday, November 19, 2011 12:25 AM To: Crispin Pemberton-Pigott Cc: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves Subject: Re: [Stoves] Stove costs Dear Crispin and Jan, Here are three partial unpublished reports and one aggregate table that I put together for GTZ as a valiant effort by an anthropologist to to turn a small sample of face to face interviews into a meaningfully differentiated model of the charcoal stove economy of Lusaka. Maybe it will illuminate some of the proverbial and continuing difficulties encountered by 'expensive' improved stoves to gain and hold on to a significant share of a local stove market that is dominated by crappy but very low cost stoves made by artisans. The TV and cell phone examples given by Crispin do not 'ring' completely true for the bottom 2/3rds of the Lusaka charcoal stove market because there poor people buy the best lowest cost phones and TV's that are on the market. So the principle is the same: poor people purchase the lowest cost stove technology on the market. Yes, it is possible for them by heroic feats of self denial to save enough money to purchase a $25 to $50 cell phone or even a more expensive TV, but if there was a cell phone or a TV on the market that cost less and still functioned adequately they would surely buy the lowest cost technology that gets the job done. What I discovered and tried to establish in this study was that low income people who live and die according to how well they manage their daily cash flows can as a rule only manage to save about 20% of their daily cash flow over a 7 day period so the amount of money a household can save in a week pretty determines the upper limit of how much they are willing/able to spend to buy the least expensive functional charcoal stove on the market. In search, Cecil Cook
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