Around 3 billion people in developing countries rely on woodfuels for their daily cooking needs with profound negative implications for their workload, health, and budget as well as the environment. Improved cooking stove (ICS) technologies appear to be an obvious solution in many cases. In...

Today 2.6 billion people in developing countries rely on biomass as primary cooking fuel, with profound negative implications for their well-being. Improved biomass cooking stoves are alleged to counteract these adverse effects. This paper evaluates take-up and impacts of low-cost improved...

Non-electrified people in Africa, still more than 500 million today, have been using kerosene and candles for their lighting purposes for decades. The lighting quality of these sources is low and in particular kerosene usage is associated with harmful soot emissions. Alleviating this grievance...

Transparent communication of robustness is essential in empirical research, yet existing tools can be difficult to interpret. This paper introduces the robustness dashboard, a graphical tool that visualizes the results of robustness reproductions into a single, intuitive graph. The robustness...

Quantitative benchmarks for cost-effective provision of rural energy access are difficult to obtain because deployment costs vary across technologies, contexts, and technical assistance approaches – but crucially also across sustainability assumptions. As an alternative, this policy...

This perspective article discusses whether energy access programs in rural Sub-Saharan Africa reach the poor in a way that most policy actors claim. We examine on- and off-grid electrification as well as improved cooking. The success of pro-poor development is predicated on the programs...

[Background] This report presents results of an impact evaluation of a market-based energy access intervention implemented by the Energising Development (EnDev) programme in rural Kenya. The EnDev Kenya intervention seeks to establish and enhance self-sustaining markets for modern energy...

This paper provides evidence on a key factor for the success of market-based approaches to disseminate modern-energy products in rural areas of developing countries: the employment and income perspectives of entrepreneurs in the related value chains. We assess the impact of a large-scale...