Combating Deforestation? – Impacts of Improved Stove Dissemination on Charcoal Consumption in Urban Senegal

With 2.7 billion people relying on woodfuels for cooking in developing countries, the dissemination of improved cooking stoves (ICS) is frequently considered an effective instrument to combat deforestation particularly in arid countries. This paper evaluates the impacts of an ICS dissemination project in urban Senegal on charcoal consumption using data collected among 624 households. The virtue of our data is that it allows for rigorously estimating charcoal savings by accounting for both household characteristics and meal-specific cooking patterns. We find average savings of 25 percent per dish. In total, the intervention reduces the Senegalese charcoal consumption by around 1 percent.