Assessing Household Cooking Energy Behavior and Potential for Transition to E-Cooking in Informal Urban Settlements

Traditional cooking methods are hazardous and time- consuming, disproportionately exposing women and girls to these negative effects [2]. In rural areas, fuelwood can be gath- ered from personal trees or the surrounding landscape [2]. How- ever, urban areas lack the luxury of gathering their biomass, and commercial fuels such as LPG are expensive due to high upfront costs and lumpy recurrent payments [1]. While higher-income households can overcome these barriers, those in dense urban informal settlements find themselves in a precarious situation [1]. Measures to drive E-cooking adoption have the greatest potential to succeed in urban informal settlements because a) access to biomass is constrained, b) most consumers are connected to the grid, and c) living quarters are smaller and lack ventilation. Since informal settlements can make up a significant proportion of the urban population, investing in the transition to clean cooking in these areas may yield the highest returns on public investments.