Earlier this month, I visited a village called Chandanpura in Madhya Pradesh to conduct more follow-up survey of the cookstove project. After almost 4 hours of exhausting travel by car, we reached the village. With the help of Haritika staff, I received user feedback from the same beneficiaries I interviewed for the baseline survey one month ago.
What a typical survey looks like
Chandanpura is the poorest village where I have visited in India. Many beneficiaries do not own basic electronic appliances such as TV, mobile and fan, and for them, the cookstove is a very new, cutting edge technology. The villagers were overall very happy with having purchased the cookstove. Many of them found it very useful. Vimla is a 38-year-old woman living in a house with three other family members, including her one child. She uses the cookstove to cook every meal and feels that the cookstove is very useful because it is easy to use when preparing meals.
An example of delicious meals cooked with a Greenway Smart Stove!
Unfortunately, 2 out of 13 interviewed households did not use the cookstove due to financial constraints. Though they had put down payment for the cookstove, they faced difficulty in making the subsequent payments to complete their purchase and, out of their own choice, have stopped using it until they could finish their payment. Because Haritika works with extremely poor villages, these things happen, even when Haritika sells each cookstove at the subsidized price of Rs.500 (9 USD); the full market price of a Greenway Smart Stove is closer to 20 USD. Considering these circumstances, Haritika started to introduce installment payment system, where beneficiaries are able to pay the fee little by little from the small amount of Rs.5 (USD 0.9). I hope that those two particular users can start using their stoves soon and start experiencing the economic and health benefits from the improved cookstove technology.
In my next blog post, I will describe detailed analyses and lessons learned from this cookstove project. Until then!
