Ipsita Das , Leonard le Roux, Richard Mulwa, Remidius Ruhinduka, Marc Jeuland 

Nearly 2.4 billion people lack access to clean cooking fuels and technologies worldwide, representing a critical failure to achieve SDG7’s cooking energy access goal. Dependence on polluting cooking fuels is particularly high in Sub-Saharan Africa, where it generates considerable environmental, health, and time-related costs. In the region, progress has been greatest in urban areas, but understanding of the dynamics of urban cooking energy transitions remains limited. On the one hand, higher average incomes and greater availability of alternative fuels, relative to rural areas, helps to explain urban populations’ generally higher access rates. Nonetheless, different cities display divergent paths, and the impacts of policy instruments in fostering household energy transition remain unclear. This paper considers the demand for several fuels among low-income households in two such contrasting cities – Nairobi (where the transition is well advanced) and Dar es Salaam (where progress has been slower). Household preference data from our double-bounded, dichotomous choice contingent valuation experiment helps us understand how urban households respond to changes in the price of their preferred cooking fuels. We find that fuel price responses vary across the income distribution and across the two cities. Specifically, the willingness to pay for the most commonly used cooking fuel in Nairobi – liquefied petroleum gas – is nearly twice that in Dar es Salaam, where more households prefer charcoal. In Dar es Salaam, low-income charcoal users appear especially entrenched in their choice of cooking fuel. The extent to which different policy tools (such as bans, taxes, or clean fuel subsidies) can be effective depends on these price sensitivities, enforcement, and also on the readiness of the supply side to meet increased demand. Importantly, policy-makers need to understand nuances in the local demand context very well when choosing appropriate instruments to support energy transition among their most vulnerable citizens.