Within the last three years, SNV, the Netherlands Development Organisation, has developed 17 projects in Asia and Africa to promote improved cookstoves (ICS), aiming to increase access to affordable clean cooking solutions at the household level. Led by country offices in Asia, Africa and Latin America, these projects have worked to bring together local and national stakeholders to develop sustainable ICS markets, strengthen their capacity, promote a choice of innovative technologies, and create an enabling environment to stimulate private-sector involvement. SNV’s ICS projects are often combined with development and production of efficient, sustainable fuels such as briquettes, char powder and...

A theory of change is an explanation of how and why a particular intervention will lead to a certain desired change or impact – establishing causal links (see Connell and Kubisch 1998; Fulbright-Anderson and Auspos 2006; Stein and Valters 2012; Weiss 1995). The change we are concerned with in this study is cookstove market transformation. In this section, we explore the wider literature and experiences on ICS market transformation and link it to SNV’s approach to ICS interventions.

Over recent years, momentum has been growing at national and international levels around the need to increase adoption of improved cookstoves and...

To address our research questions, we undertook studies in four of the 17 countries where SNV has ongoing improved cookstove projects: Cambodia, Kenya, Nepal and Rwanda. All but Kenya are Least Developed Countries – low-income nations facing substantial development challenges.¹ The cases were chosen by SNV to ensure diversity in geographical locations and settings, technological focus and project status. The small sample size limits our ability to generalize from these studies, but the cases still allow for a fairly broad spectrum of project characteristics to be explored, providing valuable lessons for all countries and ICS projects.

We collected data in...

In this section, we present case study storylines from the four case study countries: Cambodia, Kenya, Nepal and Rwanda. For each case, we give a short background to the household energy challenge in the country and then present the details of the SNV country office intervention. We close each case with our interpretation of the findings with reference to the theory of cookstove market transformation espoused in Section 2.

Despite seeing a doubling of electricity access, from 15% in 1998 to 30% in 2010 (though mostly in urban areas), roughly 92% of Cambodia’s 15.1 million people still rely on solid...

In this section, we start by comparing the case studies to draw out the similarities and differences between SNV cookstove projects in the four countries. By combining these insights with currently perceived international best practice, we propose a theory of change to reflect SNV’s approach to cookstove interventions.

We compare the four country cases based on several criteria: from the time frame, to the technology and fuel involved, to market development strategies used, to SNV’s role in the ICS sector overall. Table 2 at the end of this section summarizes the comparisons, which are discussed in more detail below.

Activities...

The purpose of this study was to analyse four ICS and fuels projects against SNV’s draft theory of change and best practices of other organizations, in order to recommend improvements to SNV’s approach and propose an ideal theory of change. This was done by undertaking field research on SNV projects in Cambodia, Kenya, Nepal and Rwanda, as well as reviewing literature on cookstove market transformation. We interviewed 72 actors in the cookstove market, including households, cookstove producers and distributors, SNV staff, SNV project partners and government officials. We reviewed project documents and locally relevant cookstove-focused literature for each of the...