Q&A: Aaron Atteridge on replacing charcoal stoves in Lusaka

In urban and peri-urban Lusaka, Zambia, messy and highly polluting mbaula stoves – little metal baskets that burn charcoal – dominate household cooking. Not only are the health and environmental consequences severe, but the cost of charcoal also consumes a large share of poor households’ incomes.

Aaron Atteridge and colleagues visited 15 homes to watch and interview cooks in their own kitchens, and talked with charcoal vendors and tinsmiths who make and sell mbaulas in local markets. They report their findings in a new SEI paper that also recommends several measures to facilitate large-scale changes in cooking practices.

Q: What prompted you to do this study?
A: The idea arose from conversations with a friend, an industrial designer in Sweden, about why so much of the development agenda has failed to deliver long-lasting change. Our sense was that it is partly a result of not understanding the people whom we expect to be part of the change process. Industrial design is based on the idea that to design a new technology or service, we first need to understand how people make decisions and how they will interact with the technology. So we thought, why not apply this approach to the question of household energy practices, and specifically biomass use for cooking?

Q: Why did you choose Zambia in particular?
A: SEI already had a programme of work on biomass energy use in sub-Saharan Africa, which gave us a regional focus, and Zambia is interesting because of the prevalence of charcoal use. Charcoal is used across the region, especially in urban areas, and the fuel is usually expensive – it’s a major financial burden for households.

Q: Where did you go, and how much time did you spend with cooks?
A: We visited homes in four or five different neighbourhoods of Lusaka, to speak with them about energy use, cooking, and how these fit into their daily practices. We also sat with women (mostly) while they were using their stoves so we could watch and ask questions. A common interview of this kind would last 1.5 to 2 hours, depending on how much time the women had available.

Q: SEI had already done research on cookstoves using household surveys. What value is added by the field work you did in Zambia?
A: The way people make decisions is influenced by different factors. If you survey households, or only interview them, you usually get explicit knowledge –that is, how people think about the question you ask. When you also observe what people do, and how they do it, you get a whole extra layer of information, what we call tacit knowledge.

What people say and what they do are not always the same thing, so when you see a contradiction, it allows you to ask more questions. Sometimes you realize your question was too narrow, or too specific, or just phrased badly. Sometimes you realize people are not aware of the difference between what they think and how they feel. Emotional responses play an important part in behaviour too.

Q: What are the most useful lessons you learned?
A: Amongst charcoal users in Lusaka, the cost of fuel is a real burden and seems to be the main driver of household choices about cooking and energy use. So policy or technology interventions that reduce household charcoal costs will have an immediate impact. This could be a more efficient stove, provided it is designed to fit with cultural norms and household aspirations, but it doesn’t have to be a cookstove.

In Lusaka, many households have access to electricity and would use it much more if costs were lower. Many have bought an expensive electrical cooker of some kind during periods when tariffs were much lower, but the devices now sit unused because prices are too high, so households switched back to charcoal.

Q: How widely could this approach be applied?
A: I think the “clean cooking” sector as a whole needs to take a step in this direction. There has too little emphasis on the fact people make decisions according to their own cultural norms, which differ from place to place, and that to design change (cleaner technologies to replace traditional practices, for instance) we first need to understand what change will make sense to those people who are supposed to take action. We’ve used this same approach in northern India as well.

The challenge with ethnographic approaches is that they can be time-consuming. What we did is a kind of “ethnography light”, where we take the same approach but spend less time in the field. Of course longer periods would be better, but most organizations are constrained for time.

Read the SEI working paper »