Does Cooking Technology Matter? Fuelwood Use and Efficiency of Different Cooking Technologies in Lilongwe District, Malawi

Biomass, mainly firewood and charcoal contributes over 90% of Malawi’s total energy demand. As a result, deforestation is increasing at unprecedented rate and firewood is becoming scarce. Individual assessment of various cooking technologies has been widely done without comparison of various cooking technologies. Therefore, this study has been devoted to compare the performance, cooking time and fuelwood usage of the three-stone fireplace, Rocket and Chitetezo cooking technologies. The study used Specific Fuel consumption (SC) as a proxy for principal indicator of cooking technology efficiency. It measures the amount of wood used per kg of food. Rocket stove has been found to use less time, less fuelwood and produces less smoke.Cooking Technology, Fuelwood, Stove Efficiency

Does Cooking Technology Matter? Fuelwood Use and Efficiency of Different Cooking Technologies in Lilongwe District, Malawi

Biomass, mainly firewood and charcoal contributes over 90% of Malawi’s total energy demand. As a result, deforestation is increasing at unprecedented rate and firewood is becoming scarce. Individual assessment of various cooking technologies has been widely done without comparison of various cooking technologies. Therefore, this study has been devoted to compare the performance, cooking time and fuelwood usage of the three-stone fireplace, Rocket and Chitetezo cooking technologies. The study used Specific Fuel consumption (SC) as a proxy for principal indicator of cooking technology efficiency. It measures the amount of wood used per kg of food. Rocket stove has been found to use less time, less fuelwood and produces less smoke

Fuelwood Use Efficiency in Cooking Technologies for Low Income Households in Malawi

Biomass, mainly firewood and charcoal contributes over 90% of Malawi’s total energy demand. As a result, deforestation is increasing at unprecedented rate threatening firewood supply. Individual assessment of various cooking technologies has been widely studied without comparing among cooking technologies. This study compares the performance of the three-stone fireplace, Rocket stove and Chitetezo stove cooking technologies in Malawi. We use Specific Fuel consumption (SC) as a proxy for principal indicator of technology efficiency. The finding reveals that Rocket stove uses less time, less fuelwood and produces less smoke. Keywords:  Cooking technology, dry wood consumption, specific fuelwood consumption

Agrarian Impact of Climate Change in Malawi: A Quantile Ricardian Analysis

This paper measures the economic impact of climate on Malawian Agriculture using the theory of Ricardian rents. We use cross-sectional data on climate, hydrological, soil and household level data for a sample of 8,832 households. The results show that climate affects net farm revenue. There is a non-linear relationship between temperature and revenue on one hand and between precipitation and revenue on the other. Estimated marginal impacts suggest that global warming is counter-productive to net farm revenue. The empirical analysis reveals that 2.5°C increase in warming results in predicted losses of US$0.0081 billion and doubling warming to 5°C amplifies the losses to US$0.018 billion. Reducing precipitation by 7% trims net revenue by 8.13% on a per hectare basis. Undoubtedly, 14% reduction in precipitation is predicted to cause reasonably larger losses of about US$0.1161 billion. It can be inferred that this significantly demonstrates Malawi‟s dependence on rain fed agriculture