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.