Surprised no one’s done the per-capita income comparison, since extra income from less charcoal usage would be a big selling point in an information campaign.
I did a very rough back-of-the-envelope calculation and estimated only 0.006% extra income via charcoal savings per year per adopter from soaking beans. I suspect that means lower tractability
If 1% of 50 million Ugandans adopt, we have 0.5 million adopters.
If 5-year savings for less charcoal used are 1.5 million USD, then annual savings are 0.3 million USD
So per-adopter savings (annually) is 0.6 USD.
And that seems low. Compare that against per-capita Uganda GDP of 1000 USD and we’re talking 0.006% extra income per year.
(Also glanced quickly at a few other indicators like median daily income, per capita GDP in PPP terms, and they seem ballpark similar)
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.
1) How much does charcoal use contribute to indoor air pollution? And how large are the negative effects in expectation?
2) How much active time/labor/attention does typical Ugandan bean cooking take? If it takes ~2.5h to cook beans and soaking them reduces it by ~30%, the time savings would be ~45minutes/day or 273 hours. If you conservatively value cooking time at $.10/h, this is worth $27/year, which is considerable. But this assumes active maintenance, which might not be a realistic model.
3) How large are typical households/ how many people cook for a household? If households are ~5 people, and only one person cooks beans for the entire household, then the time (and possibly indoor air pollution) savings are amortized by a factor of 5.
But this is all very first-principles-y, I’m sure people on the ground would have a much better sense!
Thanks Geoffrey those are all good points. This is a very preliminary analysis so there are many directions I could have gone that I missed, including this one.
2 notes on your nice botec.
first only a third of Ugandans use charcoal in my calculations, so I think you should multiply your pet person calculation by 3.
second you are calculating for every person, many of whom will be children. Savings per family will therefore be much higher. One person might be buying charcoal for 5-10 people, making their apparent saving much higher and increasing their likelihood of continuing the behavior. I’m not sure the best way to account for this
This makes the apparent savings more in the ballpark of 1000 − 1500 USD a year. But I could easily have made a mistake here.
I’m not sure also it would really be “more convenient” to go back from soaking to no soaking. It’s probably a 45 minutes plus time saving. The real difficulty will bringing about be the behavior change in the first place, which is why I went for something like a 20 percent chance of convincing 1 percent of people. I feel like if people change to soaking, they will stay soaking.
I have calculated these savings on the conservative end as well.
Ah I missed only a third of Ugandans cooking with charcoal (I’m guessing a third of Ugandan households since that’s usually how these surveys work). That does suggest we can bump up the estimate by 3x.
I don’t think we can 5x the savings because of family size. Household savings go up (compared to my individual model) but so do household expenses. So the percent income gain from charcoal savings stays the same if both scale the same.
(Technical detail: I’m not following how you got back to 1000-1500 USD from my 0.6 USD per-adopter estimate. That’s about 1500-2500x bigger than what I had!)
Another point of ignorance is what the cooks are doing when not cooking. (Linch raised a related point in a sibling comment.) If someone’s home all day, has a reliable reserve of both beans and fuel, and cooks on a regular basis, then soaking sounds free. I’m sure these are all things you’ll find out while asking around though.
On a final meta note, I’m not sure if you want the benefits here to be as large as possible. You’ve mentioned calculating on the conservative end but it’s not obvious to me that larger benefits are always good
If the charcoal savings benefit is too large, the household would have realized it on their own. To exaggerate this, suppose households could double their income by soaking beans but still weren’t doing it. There’s likely a big obstacle preventing them from soaking beans that we’d have to figure out.
Put abstractly, importance goes up but tractability goes down with larger immediate benefits.
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.
Surprised no one’s done the per-capita income comparison, since extra income from less charcoal usage would be a big selling point in an information campaign.
I did a very rough back-of-the-envelope calculation and estimated only 0.006% extra income via charcoal savings per year per adopter from soaking beans. I suspect that means lower tractability
If 1% of 50 million Ugandans adopt, we have 0.5 million adopters.
If 5-year savings for less charcoal used are 1.5 million USD, then annual savings are 0.3 million USD
So per-adopter savings (annually) is 0.6 USD.
And that seems low. Compare that against per-capita Uganda GDP of 1000 USD and we’re talking 0.006% extra income per year.
(Also glanced quickly at a few other indicators like median daily income, per capita GDP in PPP terms, and they seem ballpark similar)
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.
Interesting! 3 potential cruxes for me:
1) How much does charcoal use contribute to indoor air pollution? And how large are the negative effects in expectation?
2) How much active time/labor/attention does typical Ugandan bean cooking take? If it takes ~2.5h to cook beans and soaking them reduces it by ~30%, the time savings would be ~45minutes/day or 273 hours. If you conservatively value cooking time at $.10/h, this is worth $27/year, which is considerable. But this assumes active maintenance, which might not be a realistic model.
3) How large are typical households/ how many people cook for a household? If households are ~5 people, and only one person cooks beans for the entire household, then the time (and possibly indoor air pollution) savings are amortized by a factor of 5.
But this is all very first-principles-y, I’m sure people on the ground would have a much better sense!
Thanks Geoffrey those are all good points. This is a very preliminary analysis so there are many directions I could have gone that I missed, including this one.
2 notes on your nice botec.
first only a third of Ugandans use charcoal in my calculations, so I think you should multiply your pet person calculation by 3.
second you are calculating for every person, many of whom will be children. Savings per family will therefore be much higher. One person might be buying charcoal for 5-10 people, making their apparent saving much higher and increasing their likelihood of continuing the behavior. I’m not sure the best way to account for this
This makes the apparent savings more in the ballpark of 1000 − 1500 USD a year. But I could easily have made a mistake here.
I’m not sure also it would really be “more convenient” to go back from soaking to no soaking. It’s probably a 45 minutes plus time saving. The real difficulty will bringing about be the behavior change in the first place, which is why I went for something like a 20 percent chance of convincing 1 percent of people. I feel like if people change to soaking, they will stay soaking.
I have calculated these savings on the conservative end as well.
Hi Nick,
Ah I missed only a third of Ugandans cooking with charcoal (I’m guessing a third of Ugandan households since that’s usually how these surveys work). That does suggest we can bump up the estimate by 3x.
I don’t think we can 5x the savings because of family size. Household savings go up (compared to my individual model) but so do household expenses. So the percent income gain from charcoal savings stays the same if both scale the same.
(Technical detail: I’m not following how you got back to 1000-1500 USD from my 0.6 USD per-adopter estimate. That’s about 1500-2500x bigger than what I had!)
Another point of ignorance is what the cooks are doing when not cooking. (Linch raised a related point in a sibling comment.) If someone’s home all day, has a reliable reserve of both beans and fuel, and cooks on a regular basis, then soaking sounds free. I’m sure these are all things you’ll find out while asking around though.
On a final meta note, I’m not sure if you want the benefits here to be as large as possible. You’ve mentioned calculating on the conservative end but it’s not obvious to me that larger benefits are always good
If the charcoal savings benefit is too large, the household would have realized it on their own. To exaggerate this, suppose households could double their income by soaking beans but still weren’t doing it. There’s likely a big obstacle preventing them from soaking beans that we’d have to figure out.
Put abstractly, importance goes up but tractability goes down with larger immediate benefits.
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.