IMPROVED COOKING STOVES IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: PROBLEMS AND OPPORTUNITIES.

Abstract

This paper describes the discouraging experience obtained so far with activities designed to promote improved woodburning cooking stoves and outlines the most important technical, economic, sociocultural, and implementation-related issues constraining the promotion of these stoves in developing countries. The question arises whether improved cooking stove programs (ICS) can ever bring about widespread dissemination up to the millions? Based on important advances in the evaluation of field experience and in the knowledge of technical principles governing ICS design, it appears that a few of the elements required for success are nearly in place. The major stove groups are also making valuable efforts to link laboratory and field workers in order to achieve greater consensus on the most promising diffusion strategies. In this context, negative judgments of ICSs and suggestions to abandon what, in the first place, were merely pilot programs are premature premature. The urgency of the fuelwood crisis dictates that financial and technical assistance, local trained staff, and official policy support be stepped up in order to advance existing ICS programs toward the dissemination stage or to mount new ones for which the potential for successful diffusion can be clearly demonstrated.