UC Berkeley

Approximately 2.6 billion people, mainly adult women, cook meals using smoky solid fuels that result in devastating health outcomes. Clean fuel and stove interventions are thus a top priority for achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) related to energy access and health. These interventions, like other health or development programs, require users to continually purchase the product (e.g., clean fuels like liquefied petroleum gas (LPG)), and affordability remains a major barrier. To ease financial constraints, microcredit has been the most commonly pursued tool, yet many low-income individuals need a safe place in which to save, not necessarily borrow. In the background section, I present the results of a comprehensive review of affordability in clean cooking. The main findings of this review are that the affordability of clean fuels is poorly defined and microsavings may be a better option than credit to increase clean fuel consumption. The following chapters present the experimental and ethnographic results of a yearlong stepped-wedge randomized control trial (RCT) that assessed an informal (unbanked) saving intervention (a locked deposit box) targeted at individual households, with the original motivation of increasing LPG consumption. This intervention’s design draws from three distinct literatures: development economics, behavioral economics, and psychology. In Chapter 1, I report our findings that microsavings, structured as flexible nudges, helped individuals save for all household needs (beyond clean fuels) and for emergency reserves. Respondents had more financial awareness, shifting their perception of tiny amounts of money from trivial to now worthy of saving and as steppingstones to larger purchases. I find that household savings were exclusively in the women’s financial domain. In Chapter 2, I outline the effect of the microsavings intervention on clean fuel consumption, finding that participants do purchase more LPG, but not to the extent of exclusive use, required to see health benefits. Participants rationed their LPG and prioritized their savings to cope with financial instability, opting for general rather than dedicated savings. In Chapter 3, I offer a grounded perspective on how the disaggregated household functions and on how to define the household when considering cooking fuel purchases, when they are firmly ensconced in the female domain. I suggest new interpretations of gendered finances and spending domains that the clean cooking literature has yet to confront. Together, these chapters support the need for the energy, health, and development sectors to account for the full costs of interventions, and for the individual who is expected to pay these costs. Interventions, whether they be for saving in general or affording health/energy products, must be designed to account for the lived reality of the purchaser in order to be relevant and effective. Ignoring the gendered nature of savings and purchases, the variable nature of the household, and the full portfolio of a users’ (competing) needs and expectations, will limit both improvements in well-being as well as the global community’s ability to finance and achieve the SDGs.