Abstract
Despite a long history of Improved Cookstove (ICS) interventions by Non-Governmental Organizations, International Development partners and the Government of Nepal, the majority of rural Nepalese people cook on a traditional open fire for their large-scale cooking needs due to a significant lack of approved institutional-scale cooking solutions. Whilst 65.8% of rural Nepalese households cook with biomass as their primary fuel source to satisfy their personal energy needs, there is no information collected on institutional cooking use by the Government of Nepal. In this paper our main objective was to design, implement and evaluate a novel Institutional Improved Cookstove (IICS) to satisfy this gap and following its manufacturing and testing in a Government of Nepal approved test center, to identify the complex contextual factors that often override the technical capabilities of IICS. Our three-phase method combined qualitative and quantitative research approaches, as well as north-south collaborations involving a transdisciplinary research team to create an integrated systems approach taking into account the voices of all key energy stakeholders. Phase 1 included UK based co-design and testing at the University of Nottingham in 2017 to develop a novel IICS that could be used in rural Nepal. Phase 2 involved adapting the design to accommodate contextual factors highlighted by Nepalese partners and to meet testing requirements at a Government of Nepal approved testing center in late 2017. Phase 3 was conducted between December 2017 and April 2020 and focused on piloting the novel IICS in a range of locations, altitudes, socio-economic and cultural settings, monitoring sustained use and obtaining user feedback. We present our results through three case studies that highlight the highly contextualized nature of IICS adoption and sustained use, the importance of stacking, usability and cost savings, and a number of pathways to scale in an institutional setting.
Highlights
Irreversible respiratory health issues linked to air pollution from biomass fuels are responsible for up to 4 million deaths per year with 20% of these being children under the age of 5 (The World Bank, 2018)
Significant financial support is available for biomass-fuelled Improved Cookstove (ICS) under the Renewable Energy Subsidy Policy whilst only limited support is available for Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG) and regular load-shedding hinders cooking with electricity (Robinson, Jewitt, et al, 2021)
Drawing on key principles established by the Appropriate Technology (AT) movement, which looks to utilize local materials and processes to create products that alleviate poverty (Patnaik & Bhowmick, 2018; Schumacher, 1973; Willoughby, 1990), and through collaboration with Live to Love (L2L) International3 we developed a novel ICS design based upon the emerging household-scale Top-Lit Up-Draft (TLUD) literature (Anderson, 2016; Desrosiers & Reed, 2006; Namagembe et al, 2015; Obi et al, 2016)
Summary
Irreversible respiratory health issues linked to air pollution from biomass fuels are responsible for up to 4 million deaths per year with 20% of these being children under the age of 5 (The World Bank, 2018). A long history of Improved Cookstove (ICS) programs have focused on reducing the number of people who rely on biomass as their primary cooking fuel (Hanna et al, 2016; Jagadish & Dwivedi, 2018; Johnson & Chiang, 2015; Kirch et al, 2016; Moses et al, 2019; Prapas et al, 2014). The ICS sector has focused on improving the technical performance of ICS through the IWA Tier System (International Organization for Standardization, 2012), rather than designing for context specific end-user preferences (Mobaraka et al, 2012) This is especially true for IICS as limited research has been undertaken on the technical development of cookstoves suitable for use in institutions, small business and large households. Most IICS currently in use are large rocket stoves, as found by Habermehl (2008) rather than solutions designed for institutional, business, farm and large family settings
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