PAYG LPG in East Africa
This project is conducted in partnership with Bboxx, one of the first companies in the PAYG LPG space, and examines their commercial pilots in Rwanda and Kenya.
It is estimated that there are 2.8 billion people in the world who still cook with ‘dirty’ biomass fuels such as wood, charcoal and dung. The resulting impacts on health, the environment and gender are devastating and are particularly concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where around 950 million people still rely on woodfuels to cook, comprising a third of the global total.
LPG is widely acknowledged to be one of the most promising and scalable solutions to the problem in urban areas. However, transitioning to cooking with LPG is unaffordable for many of the world’s poorest people. This is because of the upfront costs of equipment and the need to purchase LPG in whole cylinder increments that represent 1-2 months’ worth of cooking fuel. An emerging innovation seeking to address this challenge is pay-as-you-go (PAYG) LPG, which incorporates asset financing alongside a cylinder-mounted meter that allows customers to purchase small amounts of cooking fuel at a time.
This project is conducted in partnership with Bboxx, one of the first companies in the PAYG LPG space, and examines their commercial pilots in Rwanda and Kenya. It particularly focusses on quantifying the impacts of transitioning from cooking with biomass to PAYG LPG; understanding patterns of fuel stacking in Rwanda and Kenya; testing interventions to reduce stacking with charcoal and understanding the wider potential for PAYG LPG in SSA. It forms the subject of Tash Perros’ PhD.
This project was funded by Dr. Priti Parikh’s Bboxx/Royal Academy of Engineering Fellowship.
Outputs
- https://mecs.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Understanding-Pay-As-You-Go-LPG-Customer-Behaviour.pdf
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355471835_Pay-as-you-go_LPG_A_mixed-methods_pilot_study_in_urban_Rwanda
- Policy brief
Partners
- Bboxx
- MECS
- Royal Academy of Engineering