Scaling up Clean Household Energy

Introduction

In 2018, a Special Issue on Scaling Up Clean Fuel Cooking Programs in Low- and Middle-Income Countries is an initial effort to document, analyze and disseminate case studies on clean fuel and technology programs in settings across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. We believe the studies in this volume offer some important early lessons and anticipate that a broad community of potentially interested scientists, policymakers and practitioners will find these of use in designing, evaluating and adapting related efforts.

Highlights

• Clean fuels for cooking, e.g. LPG, biogas, electricity, and ethanol/methanol, could provide public health benefits.
• Diverse clean cooking initiatives are being implemented around the world, but very few of these efforts have been analyzed.
• The Clean Cooking Implementation Science Network solicited proposals for case studies of clean cooking scale-up efforts.
• Eleven case studies were developed, spanning multiple fuel types and locations across South America, Africa, and Asia.
• Results suggest that programs require additional attention to monitoring and sustainability to maximize benefits.

While our focus in developing these case studies was to document programs most likely to yield health gains, this important goalis not the principal driver of most of the clean cooking programs we have profiled. Although health is often cited as a valuable outcome, most of these programs, and indeed most programs around the world today, are principally driven by economic development, environmental (forest) conservation,climate changemitigation and/or gender empowerment concerns (Goldemberg, Martinez-Gomez, Sagar, & Smith, 2018; Rosenthal, Quinn, Grieshop, Pillarisetti, & Glass, 2018)

One result of this mismatchis that programs may be missing important opportunities to maximize health, minimize associated costs, and integrate with other services. Multidisciplinary and multisector approaches to understanding barriers and facilitators to adoption and program implementation are clearly necessary, but coordinated national policies for household energy are still uncommon. Encouragingly, some country programs profiled here (e.g. Cameroon) have presented national energy “masterplans” that represent a stepforward in inter-agency coordination. This follows advice provided by the sustainable energy for all (SE4All) community, which has recognized that coordinated national policies for household fuels are important: to provide a supporting regulatory environment, minimize perverse or conflicting incentives, and to maximize access to clean fuel options. It remains to be seen, however, whether clean cooking programs can be effectively designed to achieve the multiple goals they often cite.

Further Information

• Scaling-up Strategies of Improved Cookstoves (ICS) [part of the GIZ HERA Cooking Energy Compendium]
• Result Based Monitoring of Cookstove Projects
• Risks in Energy Access Projects
• Publication - Scale and Sustainability: Toward a Public-Private Paradigm in Powering India
• Publication - Productive Use of Energy – Pathway to Development? Reviewing the Outcomes and Impacts of Small-scale Energy Projects in the Global South
• Publication - Energizing Finance: Scaling & Refining Finance in Countries with Large Energy Access Gaps
• Publication - Scaling Energy Access with Blended Finance: SunFunder and the Role of Catalytic Capital
• Publication - Scaling up Rooftop Solar Power in India: The Potential of Solar Municipal Bonds

Categories:  Imrproved cooking,