Driving forces for households' adoption of improved cooking stoves in rural Tanzania

Abstract

With increasingly improved cooking stoves (ICS) that aim to reduce fuelwood consumption by forest-dependent households, more evidence of what drives households to adopt ICS is needed. Using data from a representative sample (N=271) of households in a rural part of eastern Tanzania, we estimated a mixed logit model to take into account the limitations of the standard multinomial logit model and relaxed the restrictive assumption of the conditional logit model. The experiment results show a strong correlation between payment mechanisms and adoption of ICS. We also found interesting results that households provided with just one type of ICS adopted it less (30%). On the other hand, households supplied with more than one type of ICS largely adopted it (48%). In addition, the ICS that uses both charcoal and firewood was purchased by most households (80%), which raised the total uptake of ICS to 48 %. These results also provide empirical evidence of a shift from consuming firewood for energy to charcoal in rural areas. The study suggests that any efforts to promote ICS should seriously consider offering rural households a choice of ICS as opposed to a single type, inducing suppliers of ICS to extend them on credit, and offering ICS for cash at harvest time, as their cash flow depends on seasonal income from agricultural activities.