eCook Tanzania Country Report

Executive Summary
This country report captures preliminary findings and analysis of an indepth assessment of Tanzania as a potential market for eCook. eCook is a potentially transformative battery electric cooking concept designed to offer clean cooking and access to electricity to poorer households currently cooking on charcoal or other polluting fuels (Batchelor 2013; Batchelor 2015a; Batchelor 2015b). This research was funded under Energy Catalyst Round 4 of Innovate UK.

It utilized funding from DFID UK Aid through the Innovate system with partially matching funds from Gamos Ltd. The report is rich with detail and is intended to provide decision makers and researchers with new knowledge and evidence. PV-eCook and Grid-eCook have very different target markets. PV-eCook is targeted at regions where no grid infrastructure exists (nor is it likely to in the near future), i.e. rural off-grid HHs. From a system-level perspective, Grid-eCook offers the ability to rebalance and reinforce weak grid infrastructure. As a result, the key target market segments are expected to be those living at the fringes of the grid, where the infrastructure is weakest, i.e. urban slums or rural grid-connected HHs . Tanzania had been identified as a country of interest through the Global Market Study (Leary and Batchelor 2018).

The aim of this Tanzania study is to support a strategic long term mix of interventions that seek to pre-position research and knowledge such that when the pricing of components and systems reaches viability, donors, investors, private sector and civil society can take rapidly eCook to scale. The objectives of the study are to locate, quantify and characterise the market for eCook in Tanzania.

To achieve this, the programme of research includes the following key methodologies:

  1. Cooking diaries – asking households to record exactly what they cook, when and how for 6 weeks. The first two weeks cooking as they would normally do, and then asking them to transition to cooking with electricity for the remaining duration of the trial.
  2. Choice modelling surveys – asking potential future eCook users which design features they would value most in a future eCook device.
  3. Focus groups – offering a deeper qualitative exploration of how people currently cook, how they would like to cook in the future and the compatibility of these cooking practices with the strengths and weaknesses of cooking on battery-supported electrical appliances.
  4. Techno-economic modelling – refining Leach & Oduro's (2015) model and adapting it to reflect the unique market conditions in each national context
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