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