The use of small-scale off-grid renewable energy for rural electrification is now seen as part of the sustainable energy solutions. The expectation from such small-scale investment is that it can meet the basic energy needs of a household and subsequently improve someaspects of household welfare. However, these stated benefits remain largely hypothetical because there are data and methodological challenges in existing literature attempting to isolate such impact.

With increasingly improved cooking stoves (ICS) that aim to reduce fuelwood consumption by forest-dependent households, more evidence of what drives households to adopt ICS is needed. Using data from a representative sample (N=271) of households in a rural part of eastern Tanzania, we estimated a mixed logit model to take into account the limitations of the standard multinomial logit model and relaxed the restrictive assumption of the conditional logit model.

Continued high reliance on traditional biomass fuels and stoves in developing countries gives rise to several human health, environmental, and livelihood issues. However solid data on the performance of improved biomass cooking stoves remains scarce. This paper provides controlled cooking test (CCT) evidence on fuel savings from a promising improved biomass cooking stove in Ethiopia. The stove is called Mirt(meaning “best” in Amharic), and is used to bake injera, the staple food in much of Ethiopia. Injera preparation accounts for about half the primary energy consumed in the country.