Discussing results and saying goodbye

Being able to present the results of our research to the founders of the NGO and their one hundred employees and volunteers was one of my favorite parts of the internship. In most cases, there is a gap between researchers and the people who carry out the social programs and all the lessons that researchers learn get lost on the way and cannot be implemented in the “real world”. I am glad that we could close this bridge, at least once.  

 

I believe that the presentation of our research results was a learning experience for Gaby, Ade and I, the research fellows, and for the people at Kopernik. We had the opportunity to express our diagnosis of the Wonder Women program and our view of the biomass cookstove as a tool for development and to give recommendations but also to listen to their perspectives and the feasibility of implementing these recommendations.

Some of our feedback was very positive but I can imagine that some of our findings proved challenging. For example, we said that the financial benefits of the cookstove are less than they expected. Moreover, we said that Kopernik is trying to help the poor living in remote areas but they could not afford some of its prices for the clean technology. I was glad to realize that they received even the harsh feedback with an open mind.

If you want to learn more about our findings and recommendations, Kopernik published an abridged version of our report: check this link! 

Finally, as Professor Heifetz says, saying goodbye and generating closure is complex work for people. It was difficult for me to say goodbye to the welcoming Indonesia and to my research partners and adventure buddies, Gaby and Ade. Living and working in rural Indonesia has been a very challenging and informative summer experience. I am immensely grateful to Kopernik which entrusted me with the responsibility of conducting research and providing recommendations for its most important project and to the Women and Public Policy Program that without whose support I would not have been able to have had this experience.  

Is women empowerment associated with the willingness to buy biomass cookstoves?

In a previous post, I discussed the potential impact of the use of biomass cookstoves on women empowerment. For example, because women that use biomass cookstoves have to spend less time collecting firewood and cooking, they might spend more time generating income. In contrast, in this post I would like to analyze the other side of this question: are empowered women more willing to buy biomass cookstoves?

One of the main tasks that I did in my summer internship in Indonesia was collecting data and performing a quantitative analysis in order to understand what were the characteristics associated with the willingness to buy biomass cookstoves. In other words, if social enterprises want to sell biomass cookstoves, which villages should be approached and, within these villages, who should be targeted in order to maximize the chances of selling. 

The results of my analysis show that some characteristics which can be used as proxies of women´s empowerment are associated with a higher probability of buying cookstoves, while others are not. Women having a regular salary are more willing to buy cookstoves than women without a regular salary.[1] In the same way, women married and living together with their partners are also more willing to buy cookstoves. However, the fact that women participate in the purchasing decision (which could be making the decisions by themselves or sharing the decision with their partners) is not associated with the willingness to buy biomass cookstoves.

Moreover, there are other socio-economic characteristics that are not related with women empowerment but are correlated with a higher probability of buying: most of the people interested in buying a biomass cookstove live in rural or peri-urban areas, people who have good dwelling materials are more interested in buying the cookstove and people who have to buy firewood (instead of finding it around their houses) are less interested in buying it.

Finally, it was interesting to see that pieces of research in other countries that also studied the key determinants of willingness to buy a biomass cookstove found similar results. As you can see in the following table, homestay wives, women with some independent income or access to financing, married and living together with their partners or having control over the use of house income were found positively correlated with the willingness to buy cookstoves in rural Mexico, Uganda and Bangladesh.

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[1] ‘Regular salary’ employees include civil servants, NGOs school employees and other regular salary employees working in the private sector. 

Financial benefit of the biomass cookstove and the importance of individuals’ behavior

In a previous post, I discussed the potential health benefits for women and children associated with the use of biomass cookstove. Today I would like to talk about another potential benefit for the biomass cookstove users: financial savings. Specifically, I will talk about the discrepancy between the theoretical impact of the improved cookstoves on household expenditure and what actually happens in practice.  

Let’s start with the theory of change that can explain the financial benefit of the biomass cookstove. As I said before, many families in rural Indonesia use three stone fire as their cooking method. However, a lot of families are using kerosene cookstoves too (96% of the families that we visited in Kupang, 54% in Soe and 52% in Kefa). Besides being unhealthy, this cooking method is expensive. A liter of kerosene costs around 5,000 Indonesian rupiees (0.39 dollars) and the average kerosene consumption per week is 5.61 L in Kupang, 2.91 L in Soe and 4.36 L in Kefa. Because biomass cookstoves do not require kerosene and they only need firewood, which can be collected for free, biomass cookstoves have the potential of significantly reducing household expenditure.  

While in theory the biomass cookstove can reduce household expenditure, in practice, financial benefits are less than expected. In order to understand this difference between the theory and what actually happens in the field, it is important to highlight one of the results of our research: most people use multiple cooking methods, not only one. Specifically, 55% of those we interviewed use two or more cooking methods. In the same way, biomass cookstove users combined this cookstove with other methods. In this context, where there is no full transition to biomass cookstove, it makes sense that the benefits of the cookstove are less than expected.

So let’s discuss the actual financial savings experienced by people who use the cookstove. When using the improved cookstove, users reduce their kerosene consumption for cooking by 41%, from approximately 25,000 rupiees per week to 10,000[1]. This benefit is realized most by users who are able to collect firewood. However, when users have to buy wood to use the cookstove, it seems that there is no income saving.

What is interesting is that a rigorous impact evaluation of improved cookstoves in India by a HKS professor (Hanna, Duflo and Greenstone, 2012) found a similar result: “treatment households that received the improved stoves still continued to use their traditional stoves in conjunction with the new ones” and, consequently, “the treatment did not affect fuel costs”.

These two pieces of evidence show that the impact of technologies in the real-world can be really different from their effect under laboratory conditions. It is clear that individuals’ behavior influences social programs’ effectiveness and, consequently, this behavior should be taken into account when designing public policies.    

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[1] This result does not come from an experimental evaluation and the sample size is small.  

Different ways to finance social programs

Kopernik does not distribute the technologies for free, but rather it balances a philanthropic and business approach. Donors fund the upfront costs of introducing technologies and creating micro-business opportunities in remote communities. The money raised from product sales is reinvested in more technology for the last mile.

I like Kopernik's hybrid philanthropy-business model because it is attractive both for the most marginalized people and for donors. On the one hand, the fact that the poor are not beneficiaries receiving help, but rather clients that work together with Kopernik to improve their lifes, empowers them instead of creating dependency. On the other hand, this model attracts donors that are willing to invest in the social change and want their contributions to be a sustainable way to improve incomes and livelihoods permanently.

In this context, and in order to understand whether or not  there was a need and a demand for the improved cookstoves and, if so, where, we went to 32 villages and we interviewed 337 families in remote communities. We asked them more than 30 questions but the most important one was, “Would you buy this biomass cookstove at its current price?". We asked this question after showing the product and explaining its benefits.

Based on this question, we looked at people’s willingness to buy by village. As you can see, there is a lot of diversity within areas. While there are villages where no one wants to buy, such as Boentuka in Soe, there are other villages, also in Soe, in which there is a lot of interest. For example, in Oebobo, one out of every two families wants to buy the cookstove.

And here comes the most interesting finding. We asked all the people that did not want to buy the cookstove whether or not they would buy the product if it could be paid in installments.  As you may see, when allowed to pay in installment, the willingness to buy increases significantly, from 21 per cent to 80 per cent.

This result makes me think that we should analyze in depth different ways to finance social programs. It sounds great that poor families can buy new technologies that generate financial benefits for them. However, because there are liquidity constraints, flexible payment should be allowed to ensure that even the poorest can access these technologies. 

Kopernik's Wonder Women Eastern Indonesia initiative

I want to introduce the NGO that I am working for, Kopernik, and specially, it´s most fascinating project: the Wonder Women program. 

Kopernik’s founders realized that affordable technologies that have the potential to improve people's lives already existed, but they weren’t reaching the people that need them the most. So, for example, 780 million people have no access to a clean water supply, and owning a simple and cheap water filter could provide safe, clean drinking water requiring little effort and a small investment. In order to bridge this gap they launched Kopernik, which works under the idea that simple, life-changing technologies, such as solar light lamps, clean cook stoves, water filters, etc should reach remote and last mile communities to help reduce poverty.

In order to fulfill this mission, Kopernik implements different programs. The initiative that I am working on is the Wonder Women program, since in addition to the goal of scaling up energy access, it has a women’s economic empowerment component. 

How does it work? Kopernik recruits women in different communities that show interest in boosting their income through selling new technologies. These women are able to launch their own businesses without getting into debt because they receive the products on consignment and earn a margin on every sale.

Because most of these women do not have experience in business, Kopernik provides training and mentorship. On the one hand, women receive training in technology use and maintenance, sales and marketing, accounting and financial management, and public speaking. These training sessions prepare them with the skills and confidence to succeed as social entrepreneurs. On the other hand, Kopernik business development coaching and mentoring helps the women to overcome challenges and grow their businesses on a journey to becoming empowered entrepreneurs.

But let´s stop for one second on the name of the program. Generally, when people hear ‘Wonder Woman’, they instantly think about a superhero character, a world leader or a celebrity such as Dilma Rousseff, Hillary Clinton, Melinda Gates, Oprah Winfrey, etc. However, Kopernik Wonder Women are a school teacher from Soe, a housewife from Kupang, a seller in a market stall in Kefa, that have one characteristic in common: they are determined to generate positive social changes for their families through increasing their income, and for their communities by making clean technology available.  

This internship gave me the unique opportunity of meeting many real ‘Wonder Women’ with inspiring courage and community spirit. I got to know their stories by interviewing them and by trying to understand their socio-economic situation, their needs and expectations, the problems they face when they try to sell the products, and so on. One of the women that impressed me the most was a Wonder Woman in Soe, Ka Heni. She was (curiously) the youngest we met and she blew me away with her motivation and passion for being able to impact positively on her community and to increase her income. She was so committed and interested in the project that when we finished with our questions, she started asking us questions and making comments and suggestions in order to improve the program. She had great ideas about how Kopernik can support all Wonder Women to sell even more. That is, she was not only receiving what this NGO has to offer, but also contributing to introduce changes in the program for the better. Definitely Ka Heni is a change agent, an empowered woman and a Wonder Women. 

Some successes and challenges of my internship

I would like to begin by saying that the main purpose of my internship is to help Kopernik to reach more beneficiaries by designing an operational evaluation and creating a map of what potential communities Kopernik could expand its project. Our main analysis is based on household surveys, whose results are also verified through our interviews with the Wonder Women and beneficiaries. So far, we have already conducted 242 surveys to women in the areas around Soe and Kefa, in West Timor and this is the first time that Kopernik has ever had a quantitative analysis with this sample size! It is great being able to apply the quantitative tools that I have learned at HKS and to know that these tools will help Kopernik decide on which areas it is appropriate to scale-up the Wonder Women Program based on our data.  

However, the fieldwork and living in a foreign country have had a lot of challenges that I want to share:



Getting to the last mile is complicated. Some of the people that most need biomass cookstoves live in remote communities. One of the things that I liked best about Kopernik is that they work hard to reach these communities. However, the trip to get there could be very long and tiring. Just to give an example, from Bali to Oepuah Selatan, one of the villages that we visited, we had to take two flights, drive more than 12 hours and walk for a while.

Language barriers do not allow me to communicate as freely as I would like. I have to confess that I underestimated the trouble associated with not knowing the language. That complicates even simple things such as ordering food or buying cell phone credit (“pulsa”). In order to collect the information, we had to trained bi-lingual people (bah, actually they were Indonesian that knew some words in English) in every area to help us with the surveys, translated all the questionnaires, etc. Fortunately, one of my team members, Ade, is Indonesian and she has helped me a lot. The most important words that I have learned are “Permisi” (that means “excuse me” and I use it to get into houses) and “Terima kasih” (which means “thank you” and I use it for everything). Finally, smiles are universal and always help to make people come closer.



Culture here is very different. Indonesians are so kind and friendly you feel welcome everywhere. However, their culture is very different to Western culture and familiarizing ourselves with it took us some time. First, 75% of the clothes that I packed are not appropriate for Indonesian standards and I could not wear them at all. They are very conservative and wearing sleeveless t-shirts or skirts above the knee is not appropriate. Second, people get really surprised when I say that I am 26 years old and do not have a partner. They usually ask why and I always take the time to explain that it is a decision and I am happy being single.



The food is good but beware of the spicy options. My favorite dishes and fresh juices are the local Nasi Goreng, chicken satay, and Sirsak. However, the food is much spicier than in Argentina or the U.S. When I just arrived, I ate happily a red thing, thinking that it was pepper but it wasn’t, it was a red chili that made me cry and sweated.

Three-stone fire and its health consequences

First of all, sorry for the delay in updates! I spent last month doing research in remote communities in Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia, where internet connectivity is very limited.

One of the places that my two great team members, Gaby and Ade, and I visited was Soe. There we had the chance to interview 127 women in 12 remote communities. The main goal of these interviews was to understand their cooking methods, preferences and needs.

A fact that really shocked me was that 93 percent of the women that we talked to use three stone fire to cook, as seen in the image above. The main problem with this method is indoor air pollution and its consequences. Specifically, indoor biomass cooking smoke is associated with many diseases, such as respiratory illnesses and cancer, and women and young children are affected disproportionately.   

Trying to understand better the magnitude of this problem, I found some interesting pieces of data. Women and children in developing countries are exposed each day to pollution from indoor

cooking smoke up to 20 times higher than the maximum recommended levels (WHO 2005). Moreover, smoke from cooking fuels is estimated to account for nearly 2 million deaths annually, more than 99 percent of which occur in developing countries (WHO and UNDP 2009).

One of the ways to solve this problem is replacing traditional cookstoves with biomass cookstoves and this is what Kopernik is trying to do in Eastern Indonesia.