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Comparing Cookstove Usage Measured with Sensors Versus Cell Phone-Based Surveys in Darfur, Sudan

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Three billion people rely on combustion of biomass to cook their food, and the resulting air pollution kills 4 million people annually. Replacing inefficient traditional stoves with " improved cookstoves " may help reduce the dangers of cooking. Therefore analysts, policy makers, and practitioners are eager to quantify adoption of improved cookstoves. In this study, we use 170 instrumented cook-stoves as well as cellphone-based surveys to measure the adoption of free-of-charge Berkeley-Darfur Stoves (BDSs) in Darfur, Sudan where roughly 34,000 BDS have been disseminated. We estimate that at least 71 % of participants use the stove more than 10 % of days that the sensor was installed on the cookstove. Compared to sensor-measured data, surveyed participants overestimate adoption both in terms of daily hours of cooking and daily cooking events (p < 0.001). Average participants overreport daily cooking hours by 1.2 h and daily cooking events by 1.3 events. These overestimations are roughly double sensor-measured values. Data reported by participants may be erroneous due to difficulty in recollection, courtesy bias, or the desire to keep personal information obscure. A significant portion of sensors was lost during this study, presumably due to thermal damage from the unexpected commonality of charcoal fires in the BDS; thus pointing to a potential need to redesign the stove to accommodate users' desire to cook using multiple fuel types. The cooking event detection algorithm seems to perform well in terms of face validity, but a database of cooking logs or witnessed accounts of cooking is absent; the algorithm should be trained against expert-labeled data for the local cooking context to further refine its performance.
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Chapter 20
Comparing Cookstove Usage Measured
with Sensors Versus Cell Phone-Based
Surveys in Darfur, Sudan
Daniel Lawrence Wilson, Mohammed Idris Adam, Omnia Abbas,
Jeremy Coyle, Angeli Kirk, Javier Rosa and Ashok J. Gadgil
Abstract Three billion people rely on combustion of biomass to cook their food,
and the resulting air pollution kills 4 million people annually. Replacing inefcient
traditional stoves with improved cookstovesmay help reduce the dangers of
cooking. Therefore analysts, policy makers, and practitioners are eager to quantify
adoption of improved cookstoves. In this study, we use 170 instrumented cook-
stoves as well as cellphone-based surveys to measure the adoption of free-of-charge
Berkeley-Darfur Stoves (BDSs) in Darfur, Sudan where roughly 34,000 BDS have
been disseminated. We estimate that at least 71 % of participants use the stove more
than 10 % of days that the sensor was installed on the cookstove. Compared to
sensor-measured data, surveyed participants overestimate adoption both in terms of
daily hours of cooking and daily cooking events (p< 0.001). Average participants
overreport daily cooking hours by 1.2 h and daily cooking events by 1.3 events.
These overestimations are roughly double sensor-measured values. Data reported
by participants may be erroneous due to difculty in recollection, courtesy bias, or
the desire to keep personal information obscure. A signicant portion of sensors
was lost during this study, presumably due to thermal damage from the unexpected
commonality of charcoal res in the BDS; thus pointing to a potential need to
redesign the stove to accommodate usersdesire to cook using multiple fuel types.
The cooking event detection algorithm seems to perform well in terms of face
validity, but a database of cooking logs or witnessed accounts of cooking is absent;
D.L. Wilson (&)!J. Coyle !A. Kirk !J. Rosa !A.J. Gadgil
University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
e-mail: dlwilson@berkeley.edu
M.I. Adam
Al-Fashir University, Darfur, Sudan
O. Abbas
Potential Energy, Berkeley, CA, USA
A.J. Gadgil
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), University of California,
Berkeley, CA, USA
©Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015
S. Hostettler et al. (eds.), Technologies for Development,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-16247-8_20
211
the algorithm should be trained against expert-labeled data for the local cooking
context to further rene its performance.
20.1 Introduction and Purpose
Worldwide, 3 billion people rely on combustion of biomass to cook their food
(World Bank 2011). Resulting indoor and outdoor air pollution kills 4 million
people every year, making cooking smoke one of the worlds greatest environ-
mental health problems (Lim et al. 2013). Many efforts to reduce the dangers of
cooking smoke focus on replacing inefcient, high-emission, traditional stoves with
improved cookstoves,yet widespread and sustained adoption remains elusive,
and impacts are poorly understood.
Analysts, policy makers, and practitioners are eager to know which cookstoves
and marketing approaches can increase user-acceptance and long-term adoption.
Evidence remains limited in part because it has been difcult to collect accurate and
ample data on cookstove use. Because intensive direct observation can be expen-
sive, onerous, and alter user behavior (Landsberger 1958); most studies of cook-
stove adoption rely on infrequent survey-based self-reported data (Lewis and
Pattanayak 2012; Burwen 2011). These data are subject to two types of error: First,
respondents may overreport normative behaviors, generating social desirabilityor
courtesybias (Edwards 1957; Nunnally 1978). Overreporting use leads to sys-
tematic overestimates of adoption, which leads to systematic downward bias on
estimates of any positive impacts of adoption. Even without intentional misrep-
orting, respondents can struggle to recall and aggregate over large periods, but more
frequent visits are prohibitively expensive at scale and onerous for participants.
Even if recalled information is unbiased on average, any measurement error in the
dependent variables (say, fuel expenditures) reduces the precision of estimates
leading to reduced statistical signicance (Das et al. 2012).
Given these challenges and needs, the ability to monitor cookstovesuse with
objective and unobtrusive means is critical to improving products, process quality,
and properly measuring impact. Some studies have begun to implement time-and-
temperature logging stove use monitors (SUMs) which can measure cooking events
without input from the user (Berkeley Air Monitoring Group 2013; Burwen and
Levine 2012; Ruiz-Mercado et al. 2011,2013; Thomas et al. 2013). Partnering
sensors with traditional surveys allows estimates of the magnitude of error in self-
reported usage. In Guatemala, Ruiz-Mercado et al. (2013) instrumented improved
cookstoves with SUMs in 80 households every other month for 32 months. They
nd high usage (around 90 %) and relative consistency between survey and sensor-
generated data. The Berkeley Air Monitoring Group (2013) found similarly accu-
rate self-reported data for 25 cookstove users in Kenya. In Rwanda, Thomas
et al. (2013) installed 27 SUMs on cookstoves and rotated them through 97
households for an average of 9.8 days each, staggered over 5 months. They nd
212 D.L. Wilson et al.
SUMs-measured usage (73 % of users adopt) to be signicantly lower than
self-reported data (90 %).
Primary weaknesses in the current SUMs literature t into four categories: (1)
Small sample sizes or short experimental durations, (2) high exposure of users to
interactions with research staff leading to potential behavior modications, (3) a
lack of SUMs-supported studies measuring factors inuencing adoption, and (4) the
general dearth of SUMs data needed to understand a problem as complex and
contextually heterogeneous as cookstove adoption. The Berkeley Air (2013) study
employed only 25 participants, and the Thomas et al. (2013) study follows stove
users for only 2 weeks. In the Ruiz-Mercado et al. (2011,2013) and the Thomas
et al. (2013) studies, relatively high levels of adoption were observed, but this was
in the context of signicant exposure of study participants to eld staff. Thomas
et al. (2013) found small but statistically signicant declines in usage over the
course of the 2 weeks following sensor implementation, potentially due to the
saliency of observation [as seen for exercise in Prestwich et al. (2009) and savings
in Karlan et al. (2010)]. To date, SUMs have been implemented at small scales and
in relatively few contexts. Cookstove adoption is a contextually heterogeneous
problem owing to the high variability of cooking environments (e.g., cultural,
economic, and culinary factors). Therefore, regardless of shortcomings of previous
work, the literature contains a dearth of objective information on cookstove
adoption objectively measured by sensors.
In this study, we seek to improve upon previous work while adding critical
information to the small pool of studies objectively measuring cookstove adoption
with SUMs. We add signicantly to the existing literature by measuring: (1)
Adoption of cookstoves in an internally displaced peoples (IDP) camp context and
(2) the correlation between user-reported and sensor-measured cookstove adoption
both in terms of number of cooking events and hours spent cooking per day. The
Berkeley-Darfur Stove (BDS) is the subject cookstove of this study. Scientists and
students at University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory (LBNL) developed the BDS for assembly, dissemination, and use in the
Darfuri cooking context. Potential Energy, a nonprot headquartered in Berkeley,
manages the implementation of the BDS. Going by the Arabic nickname 5-Minute
Stove,the BDS is valued by customers for being a fuel-efcient and fast-cooking
stove. Between 2009 and 2013, more than 34,000 BDSs were distributed in North
Darfur to rural, urban, and internally displaced households. About 85 % of these
cookstoves, including those employed in this study, were disseminated free of charge.
20.2 Design and Methods
The Darfur SUMs experiment involved 180 women within the Al-Salam IDP camp
just outside of Al-Fashir, North Darfur. Al-Salam is made up of ve administrative
unitsthat represent the geographical origin (before moving into the camp) of the
20 Comparing Cookstove Usage Measured 213
residents within the units. The 180 women were selected by the typical means of
BDS dissemination in the IDP camps: a coordinating meeting was held with the
chief Omdas (leaders) of the each of the ve administrate units, and each Omda was
asked to select women for the study from a master list of residents within their unit.
Each Omda was instructed to select 36 women that would participate in the study
and that would be available during the period of surveys (i.e., would not be moving
away from the camp soon). Chief Omdas were provided with the schedule of the
surveys and informed selected participants of the dates of baseline and follow-up
surveys. Both baseline surveys and follow-up surveys took place in a womens
center within Al-Salam camp. Enumeration teams performed a baseline survey of
household demographics and cooking practices at the time of BDS dissemination.
Dissemination took place over 5 days (one administrative unit per day) between 28
July and 1 August 2013. Subsequently, starting in late August, one administrative
unit was followed up with and given a follow-up survey roughly every 2 weeks
until late October 2013. At the time of the follow up, SUMs data were downloaded
from instrumented stoves. No training on stove use, urging, or inducement to use
the stove was administered during the follow up; women simply answered ques-
tions such as how many times per week do you use your stove?while in the
presence of roughly 35 peers who were queued to individually answer the same
questions with one of three enumeration teams. Participants were interviewed
individually, but potentially within earshot of one another.
Of the 180 participants, 170 women had instrumented cookstoves. Ten cook-
stoves were left uninstrumented in the case that some participants declined to
consent to participate in the research at the time of dissemination (none declined).
SUMs t into one of three functional categories: Primary SUMs that sample as fast
as possible while still collecting data over the full deployment period (i.e., not
running out of memory), moderate sampling rate SUMs that sample once every
3 min, and fast sampling piggybackredundant sensors that validate data from a
primary SUM. 190 SUMs were mounted to the 170 instrumented cookstoves with
20 cookstoves having two SUMs each (one primary and one piggyback) and the
remaining 150 cookstoves having one SUM and one dummy SUMthat appeared
identical to a true SUM, but contained no sensor. Following previous work by Ruiz-
Mercado, Berkeley Air, and Levine, the sensor within the SUM, shown in Fig. 20.1,
Fig. 20.1 SUM assembly showing the primary case, iButton, spring, and cap
214 D.L. Wilson et al.
was Maxim Integrateds DS1922E high-temperature iButton with 8 kB of memory
and a temperature logging range of 15 °C140 °C in 0.5 °C increments.
As pictured in Fig. 20.2, baseline and follow-up surveys were administered by
teams of two enumerators who redundantly recorded responses on paper and on a
cell phone platform running Open Data Kit (ODK) (Hartung et al. 2010). ODK
would send original survey data back to Berkeley in real time while enumerators
performed data entry at a later date (also using ODK) for paper surveys. One
peculiar issue encountered during the study was the inability to access and use the
Google Cloud Computing-based variant of ODK Aggregate from the study loca-
tion. As Sudan is on the list of sanctioned nations managed by the United States
Ofce of Foreign Assets Control, many cloud-based technologies are inaccessible.
Our solution was to use an Aggregate instance deployed at Berkeley to commu-
nicate and collect data from our devices in the eld. This scheme also allowed us to
retain complete control over the survey data and to reduce network performance
issues occasionally encountered with Google AppEngine-based instances of ODK
Aggregate. Other possible solutions could have included deploying a local server in
country or using a virtual private network (VPN), however this would have required
substantial additional training. Upon retrieving survey data, entries were hand-
checked for obvious typographical errors (e.g., if the original ODK survey listed a
womans age as 23 and the data entry version listed it as 233, the data entry version
was manually corrected). Nonobvious incongruences were not manually corrected.
SUMs data were analyzed over the period from the rst midnight after a Units
last baseline survey until three midnights before a Unitsrst follow up survey. The
padding preceding the follow up survey is to ignore pre-survey courtesy uses.
Fig. 20.2 Women participate
in enumeration activities
while BDSs wait to be taken
home. Human subjectsfaces
have been hidden;
enumeratorsfaces are shown
20 Comparing Cookstove Usage Measured 215
SUMs data were labeled as cooking or not cooking using the following algorithm:
First, minimums and maximums were calculated and labeled using a moving
window of approximately 30 min. Maxima not more than 5 °C above ambient were
eliminated. Points not more than 1 °C above the local minima were also labeled as
minima. The initial set of extrema identied by these rules can be seen on an
example day in Fig. 20.3a1. Next, each sensor was processed going forward
through time to eliminate spurious extrema with the following rules: (1) To elim-
inate maxima due to heating not caused by cooking in the stove, maxima less than
5°C above the previous minima, and maxima with ramp rates less than 0.2 °C/min
relative to the previous minima were eliminated; (2) To eliminate minima due to
uctuations in cooking temperature expected when cooking with biomass, minima
that were within 20 % of the previous maxima (relative to the previous minima)
were eliminated. The remaining extrema are shown in Fig. 20.3a2. Third, runs of
consecutive minima and runs of consecutive minima were consolidated to identify
the start and end of cooking events, respectively. Runs of maxima were consoli-
dated by selecting the last maxima in a run not less than 80 % of the highest
maxima (relative to the previous minima), and runs of minima were consolidated by
selecting the last minima in a run that was either not more than 10 °C above the
Fig. 20.3 Boxes (a1a3)
illustrate the event detection
algorithm over a one-day
period for a particular SUM.
Ambient temperature is
shown as a black line,5°C
above ambient is shown as a
dashed black line. For fully-
processed data shown in
gure (a3), non-cooking
events are shown as in purple
dots, and cooking events in
orange dots
216 D.L. Wilson et al.
lowest maxima or not more than 10 °C above ambient. Finally, all points from each
minimum to the next maximum were labeled as cooking. The nal labeling of
cooking and not cooking is shown in Fig. 20.3a3.
Generally speaking, these algorithm labels event when the cookstoves tem-
perature is increasing rapidly due to a re or times where the cookstove is cooling
intermittently before a refuel. This algorithm is conservative in terms of cooking
duration and may overestimate the number of individual cooking events especially
for cooking behaviors where the stove is allowed to cool substantially (>80 % of the
difference between peak temperature and ambient) before fuel is reloaded. Applying
this algorithm to data from all sensors, the resulting labels of cooking events had
good face validity and no obvious systematic errors.
20.3 Results
Primary cooks in the SUMs experiment had ages ranging from 18 to 75 with a
median age of 34.5. Household size, dened as number of people who eat from the
same pot,ranged from 3 to 20 with a median of 7 members. Most households had
similar numbers of men/women and boys/girls (under 14) with a median household
having 2 women, 2 men, 1 girl, and 1.5 boys.
180 women participated in the baseline survey and 171 participated in the rst
follow up. Of the 190 sensors sent to Darfur, 137 survived to the rst follow
up. These 137 SUMs represent 122 unique cooks; 15 of the surviving sensors were
redundant piggybacksensors. Of the 122 unique cooks who had instrumented
stoves and returned functioning SUMs, 117 were administered follow-up surveys.
Figure 20.4 illustrates the fate of the 190 sensors. By far, the greatest contributor to
loss of SUMs was unrecoverable data due to thermal damage. 31 SUMs from 29
unique cooks showed likely signs of thermal damage: 28 SUMs were lost due to
dead batteries or unreadable iButton memory chips (Maxim states that overheating
can substantially shorten iButton battery life, destroy memory chips, or both) and an
additional 3 sensors showed signs of physical thermal damage including charring or
Fig. 20.4 The fate of the 190 SUMs deployed to Darfur. Blue represents SUMs successfully
recovered at the rst follow up. Shades of red represent SUMs lost to various causes. The most
signicant cause of SUMs loss was unrecoverable data due to overheating
20 Comparing Cookstove Usage Measured 217
rupturing of the iButton housing. The team had performed a substantial number of
experiments to determine appropriate placement of the SUMs to prevent over-
heating, therefore the loss of so many SUMs was puzzling. However, our team later
determined that many cooks invert the BDS and ll the bottom with charcoal to
cook. This user-led innovation allows cooks to utilize the BDS as an improved
charcoal stove, but this behavior also overheats the SUM. One ramication of
unrecoverable data from overheated SUMs is that users who exhibit behaviors that
overheat their SUMs are systematically underrepresented in SUMs data. We expect
that cooks using their cookstoves often, at high temperature, and inverted are likely
to have a much higher SUMs burnout rate than cooks who do not use their stove
regularly. For this reason, we believe that the data we show herein generally
underestimates the adoption of the BDS by the population. Furthermore, we are
able to put an upper bound on the magnitude of underestimation resulting from the
higher SUMs burnout for adopter cooks than non-adopter cooks. Unless mentioned
otherwise, the rest of the analysis in this paper assumes no bias in the estimates
obtained from the SUMs.
Using the denition of a cooking event discussed in the methods section
(Sect. 20.2), a determination was made between cookstove usersand non-users.
The distinction between a userand non-userwas determined by the proportion of
days that the stove was used. In order to account for courtesyuses immediately
before a follow up, a 2-day period preceding the rst follow-up survey was ignored.
For the purposes of this analysis, a demarcation between userand non-userwas
made at 10 % of possible stove use days during the observed period (i.e., if a par-
ticipant used the stove less than 1 in 10 days, she is categorized a non-user). This
classication is arbitrary and used only as a metric by which to separate women who
regularly use the stove and those who use it very little or not at all. Using this
classication, 71 % (87 participants) are categorized as usersand 29 % (35) as non-
users.To obtain an upper bound on the bias effect from higher SUMs failure rates
with usercooks, we recalculate this percentage assuming that all the thermally-
failed SUMs were with the usersgroup. This leads to an upper-bound estimate of
77 % (116) users and 23 % (35) nonusers. For those participants with surviving
sensors, a summary of SUMs-measured cooking behavior is tabulated in Table 20.1.
The algorithm employed in this analysis detected 7,358 individual cooking
events with average event duration of 39 min (SD = 26 min) over the timeframe
SUMs were analyzed. A histogram of event durations is shown in Fig. 20.5.
Participants in this study overestimated their BDS usage in surveys both in terms
of events per day and total cooking time per day. Relative to algorithmic estimates,
84 % of participants overestimate cooking hours, and 81 % overestimate cooking
Table 20.1 Summary data for all participants, users, and nonusers
All subjects Users Nonusers
n Mean SD n Mean SD n Mean SD
Hours 122 1.1 1.1 87 1.5 1.0 35 0.028 0.063
Events 122 1.5 1.4 87 2.0 1.3 35 0.036 0.076
218 D.L. Wilson et al.
events. The average participant overreports daily cooking hours by 1.2 h with 95 %
CI [1.0, 1.4] and overreports her daily cooking events by 1.3 events with 95 % CI
[1.11.6]. Nonusers overreport their daily use more substantially: 1.7 h with
CI [1.4, 2.1] and 2.2 events with 95 % CI [1.9, 2.6].
For the two survey questions analyzed, 160 surveys were available that had
copies of both original ODK data and data entry versions of paper surveys. Of the
320 total answers between the two questions, there was only one disagreeing pair
between original ODK data and pencil and paper data later entered via ODK.
20.4 Conclusions
The combination of SUMs and an algorithm for cooking event detection has
provided a detailed record of the frequency, timing, and duration of cooking events
from a large number of users. The experimental population is a representative proxy
for the population that has received the BDS free of charge in Darfuri IDP camps.
Although the BDS units distributed in this study were free of charge, 71 % (con-
servative) to 77 % (upper bound) of participants were categorized as usersby the
denition used in this study indicating that this stove is valued by the women who
own it. Qualitatively, BDS adoption in the Al-Salam IDP camp is high considering
that women receiving the stove were selected at random and had no personal
monetary investment in the product.
The juxtaposition of paper and cell phone-based surveys against SUMs data has
highlighted the discrepancies self-reported versus sensor-measured usage patterns.
Data from both the paper and cell phone-based surveys was consistent, and in
surveys participants overestimate adoption both in terms of hours and events
(p< 0.001) relative to the SUMs algorithm. Average participants overreport daily
cooking hours by 1.2 h and daily cooking events by 1.3 events, and nonusers
overreport daily cooking behaviors more dramatically than the average participant:
1.7 h and 2.2 events. For the average participant, these overestimations are roughly
double the SUMs-measured values for hours and cooking events, and for nonusers
0
500
1000
1500
2000
2500
0 100 200 300 400
Event Duration (minutes)
Count
Fig. 20.5 Histogram of the
duration of 7,358 individual
cooking events
20 Comparing Cookstove Usage Measured 219
overestimations are 60-fold higher than SUMs-measured values for hours and
events cooked per day. Data reported by the participants may be erroneous due to
difculty in recollection, courtesy bias, or the desire to keep personal information
obscure (e.g., as reported by eld staff, respondents may try to obscure true
household size by misreporting cooking hours) These ndings herein indicate that
data from SUMs are more detailed, accurate, and meaningful than self-report use
data, and should be preferred as a gold standard for future studies of stove use.
A portion of SUMs was lost during this study, presumably due to thermal
damage from charcoal res. For future studies, SUMs placement must be altered to
avoid damage. Additionally, Potential Energy may consider a redesign of the BDS
to better accommodate usersdesire to burn charcoal in the BDS.
A major question unanswered in this work is the correlation between the start
and stop times of algorithm-determined cooking events and truewitnessed
cooking events. While the event detection algorithm seems to perform well in terms
of face validity, absent a database of cooking logs or witnessed accounts of
cooking, the algorithm should be trained against expert-labeled data for the local
cooking context to further rene its performance.
Acknowledgments Authors gratefully acknowledge nancial support from multiple sources for
this work. The primary funding for this work comes from a DIV Phase-1 grant by the United States
Agency for International Development (USAID) to Potential Energy. Daniel Wilson and Angeli
Kirk are grateful for support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research
Fellowship. Additional funding for personnel and materials for this project has been generously
provided by funding agencies including the Development Impact Lab (USAID Cooperative
Agreement AID-OAA-A-13-00002) which is part of the USAID Higher Education Solutions
Network, the Blum Center for Developing Economies, a Behavioral Sensing Grant from The
Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), and Department of Energy Contract DE-AC02-
05CH11231 to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), operated by the University of
California.
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... Baselines constructed with project-led and national [50][51][52][53] fuel consumption surveys are vulnerable to social desirability [27][28][29][30] and recall 30,31 biases as households may want to present a uence and struggle to estimate kilograms of fuel used 30 . These biases can result in abnormally high baseline and/or low consumption values, especially when used together. ...
... Weaknesses in the methods used by cookstoves offset projects:Default surveys for all methodologies, commonly used by projects, are infrequent, simplistic, and vulnerable to social desirability [27][28][29][30] and recall 30,31 biases. ...
... These biases have been documented in both cookstove and another household-level carbon nanced technology. In the cookstove literature, studies have compared the most robust and objective monitoring (i.e., wireless sensors 21 , stove use monitors 31 Infrequent monitoring has not been shown to be indicative of the long-term mean. Studies have shown that even with objective measures (i.e., not surveys or KPTs) such as particulate and temperature sensors 80 and stove use monitors 81 , short-term measurements (e.g., one or two random or consecutive days) did not consistently estimate the long-term mean. ...
Preprint
Full-text available
Carbon offsets from improved cookstove projects could advance Sustainable Development Goals 13 (climate), 7 (energy), 5 (gender), and 3 (health). To legitimately "offset" emissions, methodologies must accurately or conservatively quantify climate impact. We conduct the first comprehensive, quantitative over/under crediting analysis of five cookstove methodologies, comparing them against published literature and our own analysis. We find misalignment, in order of importance, with: fraction of non-renewable biomass, fuel consumption, stove adoption, usage, and stacking, emission factors, rebound, and firewood-charcoal conversion factor. Additionality and leakage require more research. We estimate that our project sample, on average, is over-credited by 6.3 times. Gold Standard’s Metered and Measured methodology, which directly monitors fuel use, is most aligned with our estimates (only 1.3 times over-credited) and is best suited for fuel switching projects which provide the most abatement potential and health benefit. We provide specific recommendations for aligning all methodologies with current science.
... In years past, surveys were used to assess cookstove adoption. More recently, studies have found surveys to be unreliable for quantifying actual adoption rates as bias (recall, social desirability, etc.) is common in the results [44], [45]. Since then, several household sensor-based tools have been developed of which can be used to quantify adoption and stove stacking [46]- [49]. ...
Conference Paper
This paper presents a methodology for predicting the adoption and social impact of a product using agent-based modeling (ABM) and neural networks to aid in decision-making related to the design and implementation of the product in a sociotechnical system. The collection of primary data on the social impact of a product is also outlined. Although this paper illustrates the method for improved cookstoves in Uganda, the method can be applied to a wide range of contexts. A field study was carried out in Uganda, consisting of two phases of data collection. The data from the fieldwork was used to train a neural network to predict if an individual would adopt an improved cookstove. Data collected from surveys and the trained adoption model were used to create an ABM to estimate adoption rates and social impacts experienced by households that had adopted technology and to assess social impact indicators. The contributions of this article are a method for collecting primary social impact data on a product and how to integrate those data into a predictive agent-based social impact model. This methodology also enables the examination of leverage points in the sociotechnical system to improve the social impact of a product as it is implemented in society.
... Then, after some time, study participants are asked to self-evaluate their adoption of the technology (e.g., "how many nights last week did you sleep under the mosquito net?") and other qualitative aspects of the technology's appropriateness (e.g., "do you feel like this mosquito net does a good job keeping your family safe from malaria?"). Multiple research studies have demonstrated that responses to these kinds of questions are weakly correlated (or not correlated at all) with actual user behavior (Wilson et al., 2015(Wilson et al., , 2016aWilson et al., 2018). So, how do we measure actual user behavior? ...
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Many developing countries are attempting to prevent a rapid deterioration of air quality while still encouraging economic growth. In settings where state capacity is severely limited, enhancing the effectiveness of regulators is critical to success. Previous work has documented how Indian environmental regulators are constrained by having poor information on the pollution emitted by manufacturing plants, due to high monitoring costs, corruption, or staff constraints. This case study discusses a pilot project in the Indian state of Gujarat, designed to evaluate the benefits of Continuous Emissions Monitoring Systems (CEMS) – technology used to remotely monitor pollution emitted by industrial plants in real time. We show how the institutional context in which CEMS was deployed, which included an inflexible legal and regulatory framework and collusion between industry and labs to falsify data, cannot be divorced from an assessment of the performance of the technology solution. The eventual benefits of CEMS in the status quo regulatory framework proved limited. Nevertheless, the technology also provided an opportunity to change the rules of the game, allowing Gujarat to experiment with India’s first emissions trading scheme.
... Then, after some time, study participants are asked to self-evaluate their adoption of the technology (e.g., "how many nights last week did you sleep under the mosquito net?") and other qualitative aspects of the technology's appropriateness (e.g., "do you feel like this mosquito net does a good job keeping your family safe from malaria?"). Multiple research studies have demonstrated that responses to these kinds of questions are weakly correlated (or not correlated at all) with actual user behavior (Wilson et al., 2015(Wilson et al., , 2016aWilson et al., 2018). So, how do we measure actual user behavior? ...
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Two major challenges face humanity in the coming century. The first is to generate the innovations and productivity improvements that will keep people on a path to higher standards of living. The second is to ensure that expanding human activity does not generate negative environmental externalities that block this path to progress. In short, our future is about balancing the need for growth with the externalities that arise from that growth.KeywordsTechnology and DevelopmentTradeFinancial TechnologiesEnergy and EnvironmentClimate ChangeSustainability
... Then, after some time, study participants are asked to self-evaluate their adoption of the technology (e.g., "how many nights last week did you sleep under the mosquito net?") and other qualitative aspects of the technology's appropriateness (e.g., "do you feel like this mosquito net does a good job keeping your family safe from malaria?"). Multiple research studies have demonstrated that responses to these kinds of questions are weakly correlated (or not correlated at all) with actual user behavior (Wilson et al., 2015(Wilson et al., , 2016aWilson et al., 2018). So, how do we measure actual user behavior? ...
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Smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa produce much of the food consumed across the continent, yet with expected population growth, they will need to double production by 2050. Smallholders could significantly intensify production with the adoption of modern agricultural technologies, but many farmers are unable to find buyers willing to purchase their outputs at profitable prices. Meanwhile, buyers and traders have demand for agricultural goods but face high costs in finding farmers who can consistently supply goods with certified quality. Similarly, there is a lack of investment in food processing infrastructure because processors cannot reliably obtain produce as inputs to operations. These market failures typically manifest in the form of two development challenges: (1) there is a misalignment in the supply of and demand for the agricultural goods produced by smallholder farmers, and (2) smallholder farmers are often at a price disadvantage when it comes to knowledge of prices of their commodities. This case study measures the effect of introducing digital trading and market platforms (including price alerts, mobile phone-based trading platforms, and commodity exchanges) in Ghana, through a series of randomized control trials and quasi-experimental studies. Technologies like mobile price alerts (from Esoko) and a mobile phone-based trading platform (Kudu) are found to increase yam prices by 5%, with benefits for smallholder farmers. This increase declines over time, but there are net benefits for farmers as a result of “bargaining spillover.” The potential impacts of a new commodity exchange in Ghana are also discussed, exploring how this technology can influence the decisions of smallholder farmers, incentivizing them to produce higher-quality products.
... Then, after some time, study participants are asked to self-evaluate their adoption of the technology (e.g., "how many nights last week did you sleep under the mosquito net?") and other qualitative aspects of the technology's appropriateness (e.g., "do you feel like this mosquito net does a good job keeping your family safe from malaria?"). Multiple research studies have demonstrated that responses to these kinds of questions are weakly correlated (or not correlated at all) with actual user behavior (Wilson et al., 2015(Wilson et al., , 2016aWilson et al., 2018). So, how do we measure actual user behavior? ...
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Low state capacity makes it difficult for governments in developing countries to deliver resources to the poor. In this chapter, we highlight the role that biometric authentication can play in delivering payments and subsidized food to the poor. We describe the implementation and evaluation of two different biometric authentication systems in Andhra Pradesh (“AP Smartcards”) and Jharkhand (“Aadhaar”), India. Results from two large-scale RCTs (Muralidharan et al., 2016 and Muralidharan et al., 2020b) showed that more accurate biometric ID systems, coupled with payments and policy reforms, reduced leakages in welfare schemes in both Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand. However, there were varying results on beneficiary welfare. In Jharkhand, reduced fiscal leakage came at the expense of excluding genuine beneficiaries who were unable to meet new standards for identification. Exclusion of beneficiaries was low in Andhra Pradesh, where the government was more focused on improving beneficiary experience with welfare programs. The studies discussed in this chapter highlight how differences in policy priorities and the details of solution design influence the extent to which beneficiaries benefit from biometric authentication and accompanying reforms.
... Then, after some time, study participants are asked to self-evaluate their adoption of the technology (e.g., "how many nights last week did you sleep under the mosquito net?") and other qualitative aspects of the technology's appropriateness (e.g., "do you feel like this mosquito net does a good job keeping your family safe from malaria?"). Multiple research studies have demonstrated that responses to these kinds of questions are weakly correlated (or not correlated at all) with actual user behavior (Wilson et al., 2015(Wilson et al., , 2016aWilson et al., 2018). So, how do we measure actual user behavior? ...
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More than 617 million children and adolescents lack the basic reading and mathematics skills required to live healthy and productive lives. Malawi ranks particularly poorly, with an average pupil to teacher ratio of 77:1 and a 50% dropout rate among primary school children. Established in 2013, the Unlocking Talent initiative uses e-Learning technology to help overcome educational challenges. It equips touch-screen tablets with customisable software that delivers lessons through multisensory experiences (e.g. pictures, sound, video and animation). Throughout Malawi, small groups of students in public primary schools have accessed these tablets during weekly sessions on-site. This case study describes a series of evaluations of this e-Learning technology in Malawi, conducted in tandem with experiments in other countries (including the United Kingdom, Brazil, South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia). Following a pilot evaluation to assess the feasibility of e-Learning in raising learning outcomes, multiple large-scale randomised control trials were conducted. Learning gains hold across multiple cohorts of children and across different countries, generating more than a 3-month advantage in basic mathematics and more than a 4-month advantage in basic reading on average. The intervention also bridges gender gaps in mathematics skills attainment in Malawi.
... Then, after some time, study participants are asked to self-evaluate their adoption of the technology (e.g., "how many nights last week did you sleep under the mosquito net?") and other qualitative aspects of the technology's appropriateness (e.g., "do you feel like this mosquito net does a good job keeping your family safe from malaria?"). Multiple research studies have demonstrated that responses to these kinds of questions are weakly correlated (or not correlated at all) with actual user behavior (Wilson et al., 2015(Wilson et al., , 2016aWilson et al., 2018). So, how do we measure actual user behavior? ...
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A lack of electoral integrity in developing democracies undermines political accountability and the public good by yielding leaders who lack a governing mandate. Despite citizen activism and resources from donors to improve transparency, poor administrative functioning, corruption, and barriers to participation persistently degrade elections. This chapter presents “photo quick count” election technology and an ICT-enabled citizen adaption platform “VIP:Voice.” Photo quick count is a low-cost, ICT-capable, independently managed monitoring system of election results that provides polling station level photographic records of tally sheets to audit alongside certified results. The audit detects procedural failures by election officials and aggregation fraud (rigging that occurs in results transmission), and can deter administrative problems and corruption by announcing the audit to polling officials. First deployed in Afghanistan, iterations in Uganda and Kenya helped develop usage across national coverage and new mobile devices. This pivoted to broadening adoption and functionality using a crowdsourced platform in South Africa, VIP:Voice, that recruited citizen users through ICT channels with no pre-existing infrastructure and incorporates volunteers for photo quick count. This case furthers evidence on instruments for policy guidance on the mechanisms and cost-effective tools to bolster institutional performance and elections at scale.
... Then, after some time, study participants are asked to self-evaluate their adoption of the technology (e.g., "how many nights last week did you sleep under the mosquito net?") and other qualitative aspects of the technology's appropriateness (e.g., "do you feel like this mosquito net does a good job keeping your family safe from malaria?"). Multiple research studies have demonstrated that responses to these kinds of questions are weakly correlated (or not correlated at all) with actual user behavior (Wilson et al., 2015(Wilson et al., , 2016aWilson et al., 2018). So, how do we measure actual user behavior? ...
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Technological change has always played a role in shaping human progress. From the power loom to the mobile phone, new technologies have continuously influenced how social and economic activities are organized—sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Agricultural technologies, for example, have increased the efficiency of agricultural production and catalyzed the restructuring of economies (Bustos et al., 2016). At the same time, these innovations have degraded the environment and, in some cases, fueled inequality (Foster and Rosenzweig, 2008; Pingali, 2012). Information technology has played a catalytic role in social development, enabling collective action and inclusive political movements (Enikolopov et al., 2020; Manacorda & Tesei, 2020); yet it has also fueled political violence and perhaps even genocide (Pierskalla & Hollenbach, 2013; Fink, 2018).
Article
Remotely measuring social impact indicators of products in developing countries can enable researchers and practitioners to make informed decisions relative to the design of products, improvement of products, or social interventions that can help improve the lives of individuals. Collecting data for determining social impact indicators for long-term periods through manual methods can be cost prohibitive and preclude collection of data that could provide valuable insights. Using in situ sensors remotely deployed and paired with deep learning can enable practitioners to collect long-term data that provide insights that can be as beneficial as data collected through manual observation but with the cost and continuity made possible by sensor devices. Postulates related to successfully developing and deploying this approach have been identified and their usefulness demonstrated through an example application related to a water hand pump in Uganda in which sensor data were collected over a five-month span. Following these postulates can help researchers and practitioners avoid potential issues that could be encountered without them.
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The sustained use of cookstoves that are introduced to reduce fuel use or air pollution needs to be objectively monitored to verify the sustainability of these benefits. Quantifying stove adoption requires affordable tools, scalable methods and validated metrics of usage. We quantified the longitudinal patterns of chimney-stove use of 80 households in rural Guatemala, monitored with Stove Use Monitors (SUMs) during 32 months. We counted daily meals and days in use at each monitoring period and defined metrics like the percent stove-days in use (the fraction of days in use from all stoves and days monitored). Using robust Poisson regressions we detected small seasonal variations in stove usage, with peaks in the warm-dry season at 92% stove-days (95%CI: 87%,97%) and 2.56 average daily meals (95%CI: 2.40,2.74). With respect to these values, the percent stove-days in use decreased by 3% and 4% during the warm-rainy and cold-dry periods respectively, and the daily meals by 5% and 12% respectively. Cookstove age and household size at baseline did not affect usage. Qualitative indicators of use from recall questionnaires were consistent with SUMs measurements, indicating stable sustained use and questionnaire accuracy. These results reflect optimum conditions for cookstove adoption and for monitoring in this project, which may not occur in disseminations undertaken elsewhere. The SUMs measurements suggests that 90% stove-days is a more realistic best-case for sustained use than the 100% often assumed. Half of sample reported continued use of open-cookfires, highlighting the critical need to verify reduction of open-fire practices in stove disseminations.
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The adoption and sustained use of improved cookstoves are critical performance parameters of the cooking system that must be monitored just like the rest of the stove technical requirements to ensure the sustainability of their benefits. No stove program can achieve its goals unless people initially accept the stoves and continue using them on a long-term basis. When a new stove is brought into a household, commonly a stacking of stoves and fuels takes place with each device being used for the cooking practices where it fits best. Therefore, to better understand the adoption process and assess the impacts of introducing a new stove it is necessary to examine the relative advantages of each device in terms of each of the main cooking practices and available fuels. An emerging generation of sensor-based tools is making possible continuous and objective monitoring of the stove adoption process (from acceptance to sustained use or disadoption), and has enabled its scalability. Such monitoring is also needed for transparent verification in carbon projects and for improved dissemination by strategically targeting the users with the highest adoption potential and the substitution of cooking practices with the highest indoor air pollution or greenhouse gas contributions.
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This paper presents Open Data Kit (ODK), an ex-tensible, open-source suite of tools designed to build information services for developing regions. ODK currently provides four tools to this end: Collect, Aggregate, Voice, and Build. Collect is a mobile platform that renders application logic and supports the manipulation of data. Aggregate provides a "click-to-deploy" server that supports data storage and transfer in the "cloud" or on local servers. Voice renders application logic using phone prompts that users respond to with keypad presses. Finally, Build is a application designer that generates the logic used by the tools. Designed to be used together or independently, ODK core tools build on existing open standards and are supported by an open-source community that has contributed additional tools. We describe four deployments that demonstrate how the decisions made in the system architecture of ODK enable services that can both push and pull information in developing regions.
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