Overview
Three billion people cook with biomass, causing four million annual premature deaths and generating 22% of global black carbon emissions. Despite potentially large environmental, financial, and health benefits from improved cookstoves, the goal of widespread and sustained adoption remains elusive. There is wide demand for stronger evidence and better solutions, but data limitations that arise with traditional low-frequency self-report survey methodologies can hinder efforts to learn which cookstoves and marketing approaches support sustained adoption and to estimate impacts.
Project Vision and Strategy
The project, implemented as part of a randomized control trial of the Berkeley Ethiopia Stove (BES) in peri-urban Ethiopia, combines mobile survey technologies and sensors both for measurement and for boosting adoption directly. The combination of multiple data collection strategies in addition to traditional surveys will allow us better understand a cookstove intervention while evaluating aspects of our own research methods at the same time.
Updates
The project team has manufactured and assembled 600 cookstoves and has coordinated with University of Washington to develop and test ODK 2.0 software for tablet-based surveys. Baseline and follow-up surveys have been developed and pretest in Ethiopia and the team is currently recruiting and training enumerators in the field. The Advanced Stove Use Monitors (ASUM sensors) have been designed and lab tested.
Lead Researchers
- Professor Jeremy Magruder, Agricultural and Resource Economics, UC Berkeley