Adoption and Use of Liquified Petroleum Gas for Household Cooking in Rwanda

Abstract

Nearly all of Rwanda’s population relies on burning high polluting fuels, such as charcoal or fuelwood, for cooking their meals. Household air pollution (HAP) from burning these fuels leads to severe health conditions and is one of the leading causes of premature death in Africa, and the collection and burning of woodfuels leads to forest degradation and has climate change implications. Using data from a randomized control trial studying the uptake of biomass pellet gasification stoves in urban Rwanda, I asses the determinants of the transition from cooking with solid fuels to Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG) with a set of regression models. In our sample we see a rapid transition occurring from 2015, when only 5% of households are using LPG at all, to 2020 when 36% of households are cooking with LPG. I find that survey respondents with higher education levels have a much higher likelihood to adopt LPG, higher asset wealth is strongly associated with likelihood of adoption, and that the larger the household, the less likely they are to use LPG. Households that have access to flush toilets and clean water are much more likely to make the transition to cooking with LPG. This finding suggests synergies between Water and Sanitation Health (WASH) efforts and clean cooking programs, and that efforts in one field may lead to gains in the other. I also add to the energy ladder and fuel switching hypotheses of household energy transitions. I find that those higher up the socioeconomic ladder adopted LPG at a higher rate, but almost no households completely abandoned cooking with charcoal - even if they were using LPG primarily. The biomass pellet solution central to the randomized control trial shows an opposite pattern. LPG appears to be cost-prohibitive, while the pellet solution was reaching the poorest households in the sample. However, the pellet company went out of business before the end of the study. Households are not fuel switching as they move up the energy ladder, and whether LPG is displacing enough of the cooking with high polluting fuels in a household to meaningfully reduce HAP is up for debate. Future efforts should be focused on the suspension of solid fuel use alongside the adoption of clean fuels.