According to the 2012 NSO Statistical Year Book, more than 95% of households in Malawi rely on firewood or charcoal for cooking. The usage of wood-based fuel for preparing food has contributed to a high deforestation rate in Malawi. Forest area was reduced by more than 9% between 2001 and 2011 (see FAOStat). Using improved cook stoves, such as the Chitetezo Mbaula (left photo) or the Rocket Works Stove (right photo), which are at least 40% more fuel efficient compared to the traditional three-stone cook stove, can mitigate deforestation and consequently its negative impacts on the environment. Conservation of biomass also reduces the amount of CO2 emissions per cooked meal. Furthermore, because both types pf improved cook stoves enable a more complete combustion of firewood, their usage minimizes the emission of the particularly harmful black carbon particles.
In the project “Policies and institutions for achieving the virtuous food-energy-water nexus in sub-Saharan Africa”, a collaboration of LUANAR, the University Hohenheim (Germany) and IFPRI (Washington, DC), the adoption of the Chitetezo Mbaula and the Rocket Works Stove in Malawi is being analyzed. The international team of scholars applies socio-economic experiments to investigate the consumers’ willingness to pay for the cook stoves, and also studies the actual adoption of the technologies and the resulting improvements in terms of environment, health and labor allocation. The findings will be also used for macroeconomic modeling to simulate the impact of the adoption of improved cook stoves on the whole country.
