Love the clarity of the post but I agree with Geoffrey that the $ impact/household seems extremely low and I also don’t follow how you get to $1k+/HH (which would be like doubling household income).
Back calculating to estimate benefits/household:
$1.5m national savings over 5 years = $300k/year
Number of adopters:
50m people in Uganda
5 people/household means 10m households
1⁄3 of households use charcoal: 10m/3 = ~3m households use charcoal
1% adopt: 3m * 1% = 30k adopting households
Benefits/household: $300k/year over 30k adopting households = $10/household/ year (or just $1/person/year), which seems super low to me
I’d guess that’s at least part of why you don’t see more bean soaking already, the savings are just so modest, unless I’ve missed something in my calculation.
As you note, behaviour change around cooking practices is also super hard. When I worked at One Acre Fund Tanzania, our 2 biggest failures were introducing clean cookstoves and high-iron beans, both of which people just didn’t want to use because of how they conflicted existing norms, e.g. color of the new bean variety “bled” into ugali, making it look dirty.
So the $ benefits would make me skeptical of this as promising but I’m hoping I missed something big in my calculation!
Nice one Rory and George I agree with most of your points and appreciate the engagement a lot! Its super true that change around cooking practise is super hard—perhaps I was being ambitious at a 20% chance of 1% conversion to soaking with a $300,000, but its very hard to know.
Sorry just to clarify, the apparent $1000 a year was in response to this -. “To put that into a scale my first-world brain can understand, 0.006% over 100,000 USD is 60 USD. It’s definitely something but also feels low return for the habit change. And at that price, could easily see someone reverting back to cooking beans w/o soaking for the convenience.”
I was just correcting Geoffry’s 60 x 3 (for the 1⁄3 of population) and then x 5-10 (family size people are cooking for) saying that on his “American scale”, the apparent savings to the person buying the charcoal might be more like 1000 dollars a year. Probably shouldn’t have waded into that because of the cnfusion.
I think when we look at dollar benefits, it is important to look both on an individual and population level. I completely agree that those small individual monetary benefits will make it hard to convince people to change—but one advantage is the benefits (however tiny) are visible on a day to day basis.
But if 1% of the population could be convinced, then the aggregate benefit of money saved would be big—even if many families/individuals barely noticed the difference.
As a side note, I was pretty conservative on some inputs (charcoal saved, charcoal cost) so the benefits might be higher than stated here, even if only by a maximum of maybe 3x at the upper end.
Love the clarity of the post but I agree with Geoffrey that the $ impact/household seems extremely low and I also don’t follow how you get to $1k+/HH (which would be like doubling household income).
Back calculating to estimate benefits/household:
$1.5m national savings over 5 years = $300k/year
Number of adopters:
50m people in Uganda
5 people/household means 10m households
1⁄3 of households use charcoal: 10m/3 = ~3m households use charcoal
1% adopt: 3m * 1% = 30k adopting households
Benefits/household: $300k/year over 30k adopting households = $10/household/ year (or just $1/person/year), which seems super low to me
I’d guess that’s at least part of why you don’t see more bean soaking already, the savings are just so modest, unless I’ve missed something in my calculation.
As you note, behaviour change around cooking practices is also super hard. When I worked at One Acre Fund Tanzania, our 2 biggest failures were introducing clean cookstoves and high-iron beans, both of which people just didn’t want to use because of how they conflicted existing norms, e.g. color of the new bean variety “bled” into ugali, making it look dirty.
So the $ benefits would make me skeptical of this as promising but I’m hoping I missed something big in my calculation!
Nice one Rory and George I agree with most of your points and appreciate the engagement a lot! Its super true that change around cooking practise is super hard—perhaps I was being ambitious at a 20% chance of 1% conversion to soaking with a $300,000, but its very hard to know.
Sorry just to clarify, the apparent $1000 a year was in response to this -. “To put that into a scale my first-world brain can understand, 0.006% over 100,000 USD is 60 USD. It’s definitely something but also feels low return for the habit change. And at that price, could easily see someone reverting back to cooking beans w/o soaking for the convenience.”
I was just correcting Geoffry’s 60 x 3 (for the 1⁄3 of population) and then x 5-10 (family size people are cooking for) saying that on his “American scale”, the apparent savings to the person buying the charcoal might be more like 1000 dollars a year. Probably shouldn’t have waded into that because of the cnfusion.
I think when we look at dollar benefits, it is important to look both on an individual and population level. I completely agree that those small individual monetary benefits will make it hard to convince people to change—but one advantage is the benefits (however tiny) are visible on a day to day basis.
But if 1% of the population could be convinced, then the aggregate benefit of money saved would be big—even if many families/individuals barely noticed the difference.
As a side note, I was pretty conservative on some inputs (charcoal saved, charcoal cost) so the benefits might be higher than stated here, even if only by a maximum of maybe 3x at the upper end.