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The use of energy efficient cookstoves (EECS) has been promoted for a long and considered as instrumental in the efforts to mitigate the multiple social, economic and environmental consequences of traditional biomass cookstoves. Despite this, the adoption of EECS in pre-urban and rural Ethiopia is still very low. In response to this, the government of Ethiopia, in collaboration with international development organizations, implemented numerous initiatives aimed at improving the availability and use of EECS as part of the effort to support sustainable development. However, very little is known about the impact of the introduced EECS on improving the welfare of women. The purpose of this study is, therefore, to assess the impact of improved cookstoves projects on the welfare of women in Yaya Gullele district, Ethiopia.

A mixed research design was adopted to conduct the study. The quantitative data for the study were collected using a structured questionnaire by interviewing 388 randomly selected respondents. The data were analysed using both descriptive and inferential data analysis techniques, including the propensity score matching model using STATA.

Results of the study revealed that adoption of EECS has reduced fuel wood expense (124.65 Ethiopian Birr [ETB]/week), reduced five-year stove expense (404.67 ETB) and increased regular savings (116.58 ETB/month), which contributed for an increased annual income of participants (5,594.42 ETB). The result of the study also indicated that the use of EECS enabled the beneficiary women to reduce the amount of fuel wood use by 29.4 kg/week, which in turn reduced forest degradation and emission by 2.34 tons of CO₂e/year/household. Besides, it reduced the drudgery on women in terms of reduced time to cook (53 min/day), reduced time to collect fuelwood and prepare food (3.95 h/week) and reduced frequency of fuelwood collection trips (3.42 trips/week). The study results, in general, indicated that the adoption of EECS improved the welfare of women in the study area, where the majority of women have been suffering from the burden of using traditional stoves and associated impacts for a long.

Energy is central to most of the development-related challenges and opportunities every country faces today. The result of the study implied that policies and strategies intended at improving the availability and use of EECS as part of the effort to support sustainable development need to consider integrating such context-referenced, locally manageable and affordable EECS into the clean developmental strategies of the country.

Insights from this study can support development practitioners and policymakers to make informed decisions regarding future interventions in the use of energy efficient that have the potential to several economic, social and environmental positive development outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of rural energy transition in cooking options in India. Although India is aiming to achieve a double-digit economic growth, a large share of rural households still rely on firewood for cooking which not only has serious repercussions of increasing indoor pollution but also has a concomitant adverse effect on women and child morbidity and mortality. However, transition to clean energy options like improved cookstoves for these households may not be necessarily linear. It is often driven or resisted by latent factors such as caste, trust, social capital, information flow, social positioning of clusters that are deeply embedded in the social and cultural norms and values specific to local rural contexts. This has been shown in the present case study that pertains to eight villages in the remote and deprived Purnea district of Bihar and the need for internalizing them in the macro energy policymaking has been established in the paper.

The paper applies a macro foundation research that is complemented by micro foundation tools of fuzzy cognitive mapping-based mental model framework to achieve the purpose of the study. Focused-group discussions and interviews are also conducted to establish the narrative of the paper.

Caste, socio-political position, asset structure, remoteness, culture and technology access affect rural households’ decision making capability that is related to shifting from using the traditionalmeans of firewood and biomass based traditional cookstoves for cooking to adopting improved clean cooking stoves which will enable the transition toward the use of clean rural energy in the eight villages in Bihar chosen for this study.

The findings of the paper have larger implications for the broader macro energy policymaking in the country by taking into account the non-linear, latent factors of village contexts.

The research will help energy policymakers in decision-making and will guide the implementation process of national- and state-level policies on rural energy transition in India.

The findings of the paper will help the smoother implementation of national- and state-level rural energy transition policies for cooking, creating developmental dividends for rural Indian households.

The research is new with regard to the application of non-deterministic fuzzy cognitive mapping-based mental model approach to contribute to the country’s national- and state-level rural energy transition policies.

Clean cookstoves have emerged over the past half century as an important technological innovation to reduce indoor air pollution from cooking with traditional fuels. However, widespread adoption remains elusive, suggesting the need for other measures to accompany dissemination of clean cookstoves. Despite knowledge about health impacts of cookstove smoke and a body of evidence pointing to the efficacy of health education for supporting behaviour change, health messaging is relatively unexplored in the cookstove sector. This paper aims to present findings from action research in Cambodia that investigates how social innovation around positive and negative health messaging influences demand for clean biomass cookstoves.

An action research approach was taken, involving the design and implementation of a health marketing campaign alongside promotion of a clean burning biomass cookstove. Four communes were assigned as intervention communes and a fifth as the control group. Among the four intervention communes, two were provided with positive health messaging and the other two with negative health messaging. The methods included a baseline study of 381 households using structured surveys, roll-out of the health campaign, in-depth interviews with households and sales agents, ten focus group discussions with households and an endline structured survey of all 381 households.

Neither the type (positive/negative) nor the intensity of the health campaigns had a significant impact on stove sales. Sales results show no pattern in either variable, and sales in the control commune were not lower than in communes where health campaigns were used. However, health messaging did increase awareness about health impacts of cooking with traditional biomass burning stoves. For almost all communes, in particular those that received positive-tone messages, an increased awareness of the health impact of cooking with traditional biomass burning stoves was observed. Cookstove price and personal characteristics of individual sales agents were shown to be the strongest factors affecting sales.

The study relied on sales agents to deliver pre-assigned health messages. However, some sales agents did not follow instructions in delivering the messages, which made it difficult to compare the efficacy of the different campaign approaches. Due to a delay in the study, the campaign overlapped with the planting season when disposable incomes of famers is typically limited, reducing their ability to purchase a new cookstove. The 10-week duration of the campaign may not have been long enough to see an impact on sales, particularly for a product viewed as expensive for the average consumer.

The skill and motivation of individual sales agents can greatly affect cookstove marketing campaigns. The efficacy of individual sales agents appears to have been the strongest factor affecting sales, with the most successful sales agent using a combination of messages, including health information, to convince households to purchase the stoves. This warrants further study; designers of stove promotion campaigns might be able to learn from the behaviour and strategies of highly effective sales agents. Price continues to be an important factor influencing the adoption of clean cookstoves. In Cambodia, the main drivers of cookstove purchase (beside the sales agent) were availability of disposable income, time and fuel saved.

Health messaging was shown to have minimal effect on cookstove purchase. Indeed, it is clear that cookstove adoption is influenced by multiple factors linked in complex ways. This is a very important finding for public health workers, who need to think more broadly about how they achieve the public health goals associated with cleaner cooking through approaches that do not necessarily focus on individual health goals.

Although health messaging has shown promise as an approach for supporting behaviour change in other sectors, it has not been widely studies in the context of clean cookstove adoption. This paper contributes to filling this gap and suggests some lines of enquiry for future research. The study pioneered innovative methods such as action research, use of graphic images and using established local sales agents as means of communicating messages about the health risks of cooking smoke and the benefits of improved cookstoves.

Different pollutants emission due to the conventional energy consumption process is of major concern owed to its significant effect on human health vis-à-vis regional climate. The purpose of this paper is to develop mitigation strategies to reduce the pollutant concentrations in the rural households conducted in a pristine rural village of Indian Sunderban area.

During winter, 2014, 20 households which were using traditional biomass cookstove for cooking and kerosene-lamp for lighting (KIT-TRD) were randomly selected. Specific type of improved forced draft biomass cookstove and solar lantern were used in ten of the selected households (KIT-IMP). Real time concentrations of particulate matter (PM) (PM_2.5, PM₁₀) and carbon monoxide (CO) during day and evening time cooking period were measured in KIT-IMP and KIT-TRD. A simulation model was established to evaluate most potential factor to control the level of pollutants inside the kitchen.

Conventional processes of energy consumption in the households, along with the outdoor concentration of pollutants influence the indoor concentration of measured pollutants. The concentration of PM and CO was significantly lower in the KIT-IMP than the other. In the KIT-TRD households, the daytime concentration of PM and CO was significantly higher compared to the evening. The simulated output overestimated the concentration of PM10 and CO in the KIT-TRD.

The concentration of PM_2.5, PM₁₀ and CO significantly reduces in the indoor environment with the introduction of improved cookstove and solar lantern; however, further research is required to develop optimum sizes of window and door in the rural households to reduce the concentrations of different pollutants inside the kitchen.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a perspective on consumers and technology in a changing world using insights gained from subsistence marketplaces. Consumers in a changing world are on different parts of the economic spectrum and are also reflected in contexts of poverty that is termed subsistence marketplaces. “Data” comes from pioneering the subsistence marketplaces stream of research, education and social enterprise.

The authors study the intersection of poverty and marketplaces, beginning at the micro-level, and take a bottom-up approach to deriving implications.

The authors cover both aspects – what micro-level insights about thinking, feeling and coping mean for technology perceptions and usage in general and what specific insights are derived for designing and implementing solutions that have bearing on the use of technology. In the course of all endeavors in research, education and social enterprise, technology, particularly information and communications technology, has been central.

The authors discuss implications for research at the confluence of a variety of uncertainties inherent in the context of subsistence marketplaces, in environmental issues and climate change and in the nature and speed of technological change and progress.

In this paper, the authors discuss what subsistence marketplaces mean for consumers and technology in a changing world, lessons learned for the design and development of technological solutions, technological innovation from subsistence marketplaces and a broader discussion of the importance of bottom-up approaches to the intersection of subsistence marketplaces and technological solutions.

The authors use insights developed from pioneering the arena of subsistence marketplaces and creating synergies between research, education and social enterprise.

This introduction provides an overview of the themes and chapters of this volume.

The chapters present original qualitative and quantitative research illustrating the complex relationship between gender and food. The need to understand the relationship intersectionally and in historical context is apparent and provisioning as caring emerges as a major theme.

Food is a human right yet it is not always and everywhere available and when it is not always humanly produced and healthful. The fact that food production and consumption is gendered cannot be ignored in the quest for feeding our planet.

The chapter and the volume are intended to illustrate some of the many ways that food and gender are related and to encourage gender scholars to continue to pay attention to food research.

Entrepreneurship.

The portable solar cooker case is appropriate for upper division undergraduate and graduate students in entrepreneurship, international, strategy or sustainability courses.

xCRUZA, a small industrial design studio in Buenos Aires, Argentina, has experienced limited success and expansion since the company was founded in 2005. Focusing on eco design principles, xCRUZA has maintained an eclectic design mix pertaining to product development in children's toys, medicine, and cleaning products. Challenged by a struggling Argentine economy, a population not focused on environmental concerns, and a general lack of capital availability, the founders of xCRUZA chose to design, develop, market and sell a portable solar cooker. The cooker was originally designed by two of the founders while studying engineering at university. While innovative and award winning in design, xCRUZA's solar cooker has proven to be a challenge to the founders' success both in getting their product to market and fulfilling the mission of the studio.

The learning objectives for the case include: to explore the challenges of an entrepreneurial start-up dedicated to eco design and sustainability principles, to examine market opportunities and consider approaches to selling in dissimilar markets, generate a discussion on strategies that xCRUZA has and can employ, to analyze the mission and direction of xCRUZA. Are they on the right track?

Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

This study aims to investigate the influence of specific socioeconomic factors, namely neighborhood, gender roles and affordability, on the continuous use of clean cooking technologies (CCTs) in households, using evidence from Uganda.

This study adopted an explanatory quantitative design. A questionnaire survey with 379 clean household responses was conducted. The data were analyzed using the Smart Partial Least Squares (PLS) software.

The results indicate that the sustained use of clean cooking technologies in households in Uganda is significantly associated with neighborhood influence, shared gender roles and affordability, collectively accounting for 27.7% of the variance.

The three dimensions of socioeconomic factors under study partially explain the sustained use of CCTs in Uganda. The study does not delve into other socioeconomic factors that could probably account for 72.2% of the variance not explained. The quantitative design may have overlooked the social reality perspectives inherent in qualitative studies that other researchers may endeavor to exploit.

The authors integrated three dimensions of socioeconomic factors – neighborhood influence, gender roles and affordability – with the diffusion of innovation theory (DIT) using Smart PLS to explain the continuous use of CCTs within households.