Technologies that are appropriate, affordable, and sustainable are needed to increase incomes and resilience among sub-Saharan African smallholder farmers. A combination of thermization and low-cost evaporative cooling, termed Evakuuling, was developed to enable rural smallholder dairy farmers to preserve their evening milk in the absence of grid-electricity. The “EvaKuula” was configured to be powered by biogas. Biogas is used for the thermization process of the system. The evaporative cooling component is powered by wind. Use of biogas from domestic biogas plants add circularity value to smallholder farms. However, domestic biogas plant set-ups are relatively high capital investments and as such, a financial barrier to co-adoption with the EvaKuula. To lower this barrier, other energy sources have been considered. The purpose of this study was to assess alternative energy sources to power the thermization component of the EvaKuula. The list of energy sources considered included biogas, butane, kerosene, charcoal, and firewood. These energy sources were assessed with respect to the sum of the social and market costs. The product of a unit of fuel cost and the units consumed represented the “market cost.” The product of the long-term social carbon cost and total carbon dioxide emission equivalence represented the “social cost.” Regular and improved stoves were included in the charcoal and firewood analysis. As expected, biogas ranked on top of the list, followed by butane and kerosene. However, butane and kerosene are not easily accessible in rural setting. Approximated 76% of farmers in rural sub-Saharan Africa rely on firewood to meet domestic needs like cooking. Butane and kerosene are the fuel sources predominantly used in urban and peri-urban areas, due to accessibility and affordability. Incomes are typically higher among urban dwellers. Therefore, with butane and kerosene not readily available to the target EvaKuula users, the next best option was firewood, provided it is combusted in improved efficient stoves such as Lorena type. Key words: alternative energy, evaporative cooling, sustainable development, food security, circularity, smallholder farmers
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Migration and fuel use in rural Zambia
Abstract What is the effect of migration on fuel use in rural Zambia? Opportunities to increase income can be scarce in this setting; in response, households may pursue a migration strategy to increase resources as well as to mitigate risk. Migrant remittances may make it possible for households to shift from primary reliance on firewood to charcoal, and the loss of productive labor through migration may reinforce this shift. This paper uses four waves of panel data collected as part of the Child Grant Programme in rural Zambia to examine the connection between migration and the choice of firewood or charcoal as cooking fuel and finds evidence for both mechanisms. Importantly, this paper considers migration as a process, including out as well as return migration, embedding it in the context of household dynamics generally. Empirical results suggest that while out-migration helps move households away from firewood as a fuel source, return migration moves them back, but because the former is more common, the overall effect of migration is to shift households away from primary reliance on firewood.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1743741
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10318107
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Population and Environment
- Volume:
- 43
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0199-0039
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract Background Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7 calls for “universal access to affordable, reliable, modern energy services” for the 2.6 billion individuals lacking access to clean cooking fuels and stoves. Low- and middle-income countries are designing policies towards clean fuels, but often prioritize World Health Organization defined ‘clean’ fuels and stoves to urban areas. As clean solutions are explored, it remains unclear what rural households prefer as their clean alternative.
Methods This study conducted household energy surveys with main cooks across four villages in Shirati, Tanzania to understand rural household preferences within the viable clean fuels. Data analysis includes descriptive statistics and a generalized linear model with the Poisson family and log link to estimate prevalence ratios, all of which were conducted in Microsoft Excel and STATA 16.1.
Results The results revealed that while 83% of households (
n = 187) stacked a combination of firewood, charcoal, liquified petroleum gas (LPG), and/or kerosene, 82% [95% Confidence Interval: 74%, 89%] of households stated a preference to use LPG. We found that aggregate expenditure on LPG was less than daily purchases of charcoal and firewood. Our analysis found that all villages had a higher prevalence of stacking firewood, charcoal, and LPG, than areas further from the main trading center. Both areas with trading posts had a lower prevalence of using only firewood.Conclusions Household preference should be systematically incorporated into clean cooking policy decisions. Our results imply that LPG should not be pursued only in urban contexts. We discuss how preference affect adoption and the need to include user preferences to meet universal clean cooking access (SDG 7).
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Abstract Urban populations globally are expected to increase by approximately 2.5 billion by 2050. Much of this growth is taking place in African cities, where about 40% of Africans live in urban areas with populations of less than 250,000. In many of these cities, rapid urban growth has outpaced economic and social development, resulting in high levels of urban poverty and widespread food insecurity. As one response strategy, urban households may leverage their linkages with rural areas and other towns or cities to supplement their food consumption, for example through food remittances or food purchases from remote retailers. While this strategy has been found to occur among inhabitants of large cities where existing research on urban food systems and urban food linkages with other areas has focused, the dynamics in smaller cities are likely different. In this paper, we draw on data from 837 surveys collected in 2021 to investigate household food sourcing strategies across 14 urban areas in Zambia with populations less than 100,000. We find that rural-urban food linkages are dominated by grains while urban-urban food linkages are predominantly composed of higher value foods. Our data further suggest that urban area characteristics explain more of the variability in food sourcing behaviors than household level characteristics, and that urban food purchasing preferences in secondary urban areas are sensitive to the food retail landscape available to households. These relationships highlight the disparate role that rural and urban linkages play across cities of different sizes. They suggest a need for food-related policies to consider diverse urban food systems among smaller cities.
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Understanding and integrating a user’s decision-making process into design and implementation strategies for clean energy technologies may lead to higher product adoption rates and ultimately increased impacts, particularly for those products that require a change in habit or behavior. To evaluate the key attributes that formulate a user’s decision-making behavior to adopt a new clean technology, this study presents the application of the Theory of Planned Behavior, a method to quantify the main psychological attributes that make up a user’s intention for health and environmental behaviors. This theory was applied to the study of biomass cookstoves. Surveys in two rural communities in Honduras and Uganda were conducted to evaluate households’ intentions regarding adoption of improved biomass cookstoves. Multiple ordered logistic regressions method presented the most statistically significant results for the collected data of the case studies. Baseline results showed users had a significant positive mindset to replace their traditional practices. In Honduras, users valued smoke reduction more than other attributes and in average the odds for a household with slightly higher attitude toward reducing smoke emissions were 2.1 times greater to use a clean technology than someone who did not value smoke reduction as much. In Uganda, less firewood consumption was the most important attribute and on average the odds for households were 1.9 times more to adopt a clean technology to save fuel than someone who did not value fuelwood saving as much. After two months of using a cookstove, in Honduras, households’ perception of the feasibility of replacing traditional stoves, or perceived behavioral control, slightly decreased suggesting that as users became more familiar with the clean technology they perceived less hindrances to change their traditional habits. Information such as this could be utilized for design of the technologies that require user behavior changes to be effective.more » « less
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Understanding and integrating a user’s decision-making process into design and implementation strategies for clean energy technologies may lead to higher product adoption rates and ultimately increased impacts, particularly for those products that require a change in habit or behavior. To evaluate the key attributes that formulate a user’s decision-making behavior to adopt a new clean technology, this study presents the application of the Theory of Planned Behavior, a method to quantify the main psychological attributes that make up a user’s intention for health and environmental behaviors. This theory was applied to the study of biomass cookstoves. Surveys in two rural communities in Honduras and Uganda were conducted to evaluate households’ intentions regarding adoption of improved biomass cookstoves. Multiple ordered logistic regressions method presented the most statistically significant results for the collected data of the case studies. Baseline results showed users had a significant positive mindset to replace their traditional practices. In Honduras, users valued smoke reduction more than other attributes and in average the odds for a household with slightly higher attitude toward reducing smoke emissions were 2.1 times greater to use a clean technology than someone who did not value smoke reduction as much. In Uganda, less firewood consumption was the most important attribute and on average the odds for households were 1.9 times more to adopt a clean technology to save fuel than someone who did not value fuelwood saving as much. After two months of using a cookstove, in Honduras, households’ perception of the feasibility of replacing traditional stoves, or perceived behavioral control, slightly decreased suggesting that as users became more familiar with the clean technology they perceived less hindrances to change their traditional habits. Information such as this could be utilized for design of the technologies that require user behavior changes to be effective.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-021-00385-7
