Project Title: User-centered design to promote electric cooking transitions in informal settlements
A growing majority of urban dwellers (60%) live in informal settlements (“slums”) and rely on wood or charcoal as their primary source of cooking fuel. Though e-cooking solutions have proliferated in recent years as governments like Uganda’s work to improve the enabling environment for private sector providers, e-cooking is most likely to be taken up by users that are socioeconomically relatively advantaged. This is a concern for both equity and impact. The urban health and equity benefits of e-cooking interventions will ultimately be limited if they are unavailable to the low-income majority of urban residents. This project is an extension of an interdisciplinary research initiative called Spotlight Kampala. Since 2021 we have worked with 25 informal settlements in Kampala, Uganda to advocate for solutions to address energy poverty. The communities have identified off-grid cooking as an urgent area for action, but there is a critical knowledge gap around how off-grid, renewable systems can be adapted to meet the community’s needs. This project will develop, deploy, test, and innovate standalone systems to support solar electric cooking in a user-based design process with partner communities. We will purchase systems that are already commercially available on the local market and adapt them to incorporate feedback from community design sessions and enable pay-as-you-go and remote monitoring capabilities. In phase 1 we will prototype and field test 15 systems. In phase 2, we will commercially launch 45 systems across two business models to explore different payment structures, ownership and governance models, and maintenance procedures.