Building capacity in field-based stove monitoring
The successful “Measuring and Understanding Household Stove Use” workshop, held from 1-4 August 2016 in Vietnam, marked the final activity of the series of technical capacity building workshops on field-based stove monitoring.
The workshop series was organised by U.S. EPA and WINROCK International and this final workshop was co-hosted by SNV Vietnam. After the workshop, SNV Vietnam was granted 192 stove usage monitoring devices, a technology that allows us to precisely track temperature changes on stoves. During a three-month study, SNV Vietnam will use the monitors to measure the use of stoves in 60 households under the “Market Acceleration of advanced clean cookstoves in the greater Mekong sub-regions” (ACCS) project.
The workshop was attended by 20 participations from 5 countries working in different sectors, including private companies producing cookstoves, research and development, NGOs working in Vietnam, Lao PDR, Cambodia and Indonesia, a representative from US EPA and a trainer from the Berkeley Air Monitoring Group.
The diversity of participants in the group resulted in different perspectives being discussed around stove monitoring, which increased participants' understanding of the advantages of the equipment to monitor stove usage and challenges in the field. During the four-day workshop, three practical sections were held to equip participants with hands-on skills. Furthermore, field visits were organised to practise placing stove usage monitors on stoves and learn how to work with the consent form, observation form and stove use form. At the end of the workshop, participants were able to:
Understand the importance of background and context for evaluating stove use/adoption.
Plan, develop and execute an informative, high-quality stove usage study.
Analyse and use the data collected and share knowledge with others working in the field to build capacity on a regional level.
SNV is a leading organisation in the cookstove sector in Vietnam. The unbiased, precise, real-time data on technology adoptions and programme interventions will allow us to precisely track temperature changes on stoves. This approach is believed to yield more accurate results as compared to asking families about their usage habits. The workshop and its follow-up study (which will be conducted by the ACCS team and a PhD student from the University of Science and Technology in Hanoi), will deliver valuable information for monitoring donors' objectives for the ACCS project (Energising Development and the Blue Moon Fund) as well as for the sustainable development of the advanced clean cookstoves community's work in Vietnam. Finally, it will also inform us about the displacement of current stoves so that we can calculate the carbon emissions reduced as a result of our interventions. This in turn is a pre-requisite for the project to register with the voluntary carbon standard so that it can start generating voluntary emission reduction certificates.