How to Increase the Use of Clean Cookstoves and Solar Lighting in Rural Ethiopia and Beyond

Credit: Becky Williams CC License/Flickr

In rural Ethiopia women are more likely than men to collect firewood and cook over stoves that emit harmful smoke. Meanwhile, men are more likely than women to control how household income is spent. Accordingly, men are less likely than women to purchase improved cooking stoves that emit fewer pollutants while cooking.

This is the case in rural Ethiopia and also across rural communities throughout much of the developing world.   

Dr. Sied Hassan, sought to dig deeper into this phenomenon.  He designed an inventive field experiment to uncover the willingness of men versus the willingness of women to pay for an improved cookstove. Dr. Sied Hassan is a research fellow at Ethiopian Policy Studies institute, a think tank in Ethiopia. He discusses his experiment and the very big policy implications of his findings. We also discuss a related experiment in which he tested various methods to increase the willingness of rural households to pay for solar lig…