Driving forces for households' adoption of improved cooking stoves in rural Tanzania
Journal article, 2018

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.

Author

Yusuph Kulindwa

Chalmers, Space, Earth and Environment, Energy Technology

University of Dar es Saalam

Razack Lokina

University of Dar es Saalam

Erik Ahlgren

Chalmers, Space, Earth and Environment, Energy Technology

Energy Strategy Reviews

2211-467X (ISSN)

Vol. 20 102-112

Subject Categories

Agricultural Science

Economics

Probability Theory and Statistics

DOI

10.1016/j.esr.2017.12.005

More information

Latest update

5/26/2023