Cookstove Measurement Technology Project

Three billion people cook with biomass, causing four million annual premature deaths and generating 22% of global black carbon emissions. Despite potentially large environmental, financial, and health benefits from improved cookstoves, the goal of widespread and sustained adoption remains elusive. There is wide demand for stronger evidence and better solutions, but data limitations that arise with traditional low-frequency self-report survey methodologies can hinder efforts to learn which cookstoves and marketing approaches support sustained adoption and to estimate impacts.
This project, implemented as part of a randomized control trial of the Berkeley Ethiopia Stove (BES) in peri-urban Ethiopia, combines mobile survey technologies and sensors both for measurement and for boosting adoption directly. The combination of multiple data collection strategies in addition to traditional surveys allowing for a comparison of research methods while performing an evaluation of the cookstove intervention. The project team manufactured 600 cookstoves and coordinated with University of Washington to develop and test ODK 2.0 software for tablet-based surveys. Both digital surveys and Advanced Stove Use Monitors (ASUM sensors) were designed and deployed.