Full Life-Cycle Trial Periods as a Way to Stimulate the Adoption of More Efficient Bioenergy Technologies in Rural Senegal
This research is part of the project “Bioenergy, Bioeconomy and Food Security - Development research and policy advise on the nexus of energy, food, water and land” funded by the German Ministry for EconomicCooperation and Development (BMZ). The objective of this umbrella project is to provide evidence-based support for policies promoting technological and institutional innovations in bioenergy, and more broadly in decentralized energy options in developing countries. The research is supposed to take into particular account the inter-linkages of energy with other components of the water-energy-food security nexus.RWI cooperates with the Center for Development Research (ZEF) on a research project that intends to explore factors that stimulate the adoption of new bioenergy technologies in rural Senegal, with special emphasis on the adoption of improved cook stoves. The main component of the study is to experimentally analyse whether a full life-cycle trial period can increase the willingness to pay and eventually adoption of improved cooking stoves. The question whether the poor are able and willing to pay for improved cookstoves is crucial for policies aiming toachieve the goal of the United Nations Sustainable Energy for All (SE4All) to reach universal access to modern cooking energy until 2030. The ambition of this goal becomes clear taking into account that today more than 3 billion people in the developing world use firewood and charcoal in inefficient stoves or even in open fire spots for their daily cooking purposes. For the purpose of this research, a willingness-to-pay experiment will be conducted among a sample of households that have participated in a randomized controlled trial conducted in cooperation with Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) in 2009 and 2010. The experiment will be complemented by a survey that explores household decisions related to their allocation of resources on bioenergy production and to their choice of modern energy options under increasing shortage of bioenergy.
Publications
Project start:
01. August 2015
Project end:
31. October 2018
Project staff:
Prof. Dr. Jörg Peters,
Dr. Gunther Bensch
Funding:
Bundesministerium für wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung