Lesson 1: Raise awareness about the health impact of indoor air pollution: Users of traditional chulhas have minimal awareness about the long-term effects of IAP. Health issues need to be highlighted in dissemination and communication strategies to increase demand for advanced cook stoves.
Lesson 2: Reorient the Government’s role: Experience from Maharashtra indicated that Government support aimed at promoting commercialization and providing modest loans to entrepreneurs to design, manufacture and market advanced cook stoves, rather than providing heavy subsidies directly to consumers was effective.
Lesson 3: Reconsider the approach for subsidies: Barring the case of Andhra Pradesh, where subsidies facilitated initial purchase of stoves, there is no evidence that subsidies motivate consumers to buy and use products on a sustained basis.
Lesson 4: Enhance interface between designers, manufacturers and consumers: Improved efficiency or costs of the stove are no guarantee for ensuring adoption or usage. Experience indicates that families are reluctant to adopt improved cook stoves if they are difficult to install or maintain or less convenient and less adaptable to local preferences as compared to traditional ones.
Lesson 5: Prioritize and target resource-poor regions: The potential of ACS improved as a rural energy solution when programs targeted geographic locations with severe biomass scarcity, or where people had to buy firewood or spend a considerable amount of time collecting fuel.
Lesson 6: Empower local technical back-up units for a more proactive role: From the experience in a couple of states, it is evident that where local technical back-up units were engaged in research and development (R&D), training, quality assurance and stove testing and had proactive interaction with stove producers and consumers, consumer priorities received just as much attention as adherence to technical standards.
Lesson 7: Address administrative barriers of hierarchical layers: In NPIC, the administration was fragmented, moving from centre to six regional offices, to states and further to districts and finally talukas. In many countries, the Central government gave contracts directly to local governments, bypassing many bureaucratic hurdles.
Lesson 8: Encourage self-sustaining commercial enterprises: Recent bottom-up, demand-based marketing approaches by civil society organizations which involve the establishment of local self-sustaining commercial enterprises in rural communities, such as through women’s groups, have proved to be more successful than the top-down, subsidy-based programs.
Lesson 9: Emphasize the benefits from reduced smoke: Fuel efficiency was the mantra of ACS, particularly under NPIC. This focus on energy efficiency precluded sufficient attention to removal of smoke as a benefit both in design and dissemination.
Lesson 10: Ensure supportive supervision, monitoring and evaluation: The NPIC was plagued with problems associated with a top-down approach and weak monitoring mechanisms. Thus, many of the grass root problems such as poor acceptance or inferior quality of the stoves came to light late in the span of program’s life leaving little or no scope for corrective action.
Quick link to the USAID-funded film on Indoor Air Pollution and the Chulha:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef3zBm8cdLM&feature=related