Thanks T.J—yes I mentioned the potential health benefits but they are hard to quantify. There are a lot of reasonable claims of deaths from indoor air pollution in SSA, but finding concrete benefits in large studies from reducing indoor smoke have as of yet been elusive. For example Givewell did a literature review on potential health benefits of converting to clean cookstoves and found nothing conclusive. I still think there is almost certainly a significant health benefit from reduced time breathing in that nasty smoke. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a cooking hut, its quite an experience—somtimes smoke is so thick you can’t see the far wall.
On the moving to gas, that’s a reasonable ida although there is quite a big initial capital expenditure, and here in Uganda at least cooking beans for 2 hours with gas still costs more than 2 hours with charcoal—it surprises me that DRC is different and that gas is actually cheaper there.
As a side note here charcoal is “Maka”, so a similar name!
Moving to electric is more reasonable as it will likely be cheaper than charcoal, but power outages are so common it can’t be relied on. That’s a huge behaviour change which again that has a very high initial capital cost so would be very difficult—personally I don’t think it would work in Uganda right now at least.
Thanks T.J—yes I mentioned the potential health benefits but they are hard to quantify. There are a lot of reasonable claims of deaths from indoor air pollution in SSA, but finding concrete benefits in large studies from reducing indoor smoke have as of yet been elusive. For example Givewell did a literature review on potential health benefits of converting to clean cookstoves and found nothing conclusive. I still think there is almost certainly a significant health benefit from reduced time breathing in that nasty smoke. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a cooking hut, its quite an experience—somtimes smoke is so thick you can’t see the far wall.
https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/clean-cookstoves
On the moving to gas, that’s a reasonable ida although there is quite a big initial capital expenditure, and here in Uganda at least cooking beans for 2 hours with gas still costs more than 2 hours with charcoal—it surprises me that DRC is different and that gas is actually cheaper there.
As a side note here charcoal is “Maka”, so a similar name!
Moving to electric is more reasonable as it will likely be cheaper than charcoal, but power outages are so common it can’t be relied on. That’s a huge behaviour change which again that has a very high initial capital cost so would be very difficult—personally I don’t think it would work in Uganda right now at least.