The cost of switching to alternative sources of energy for cooking has remained high despite the urgent need to reduce reliance on firewood and charcoal for domestic use.

The scrapping of tax on liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) has not lowered the prices for low-income households. This is because the incentive only covers the gas and not the fittings (cylinder, pipe and regulator) which are the most expensive.

For instance, while the price for the 12kg gas cylinder dropped from between Rwf18,000 and Rwf23,000 to Rwf13,000 in the past couple of years, the cylinder still costs (Rwf35,000), the table top cooker costs (Rwf45,000), pipe (Rwf5,000) and Rwf15,000 for the regulator kept increasing, bringing the total to Rwf120,000.

“The cost of each of the extra fittings almost doubles or triples the value of the gas, and that’s why most retailers aim at making profits from the accessories and not the gas,” said Salim Kamali, a marketer with Lake Petroleum, the supplier of the equipment said.

“…and unlike the gas sourced from Kenya and Tanzania, the accessories come from Dubai where they are currently bought expensively due to the hike in dollar value,” he added.

For most dealers, consumers would only feel a reprieve if the import duty was to be scrapped on both the LPG and accessories, thus the majority of average wood and charcoal users could attract to switching.

Currently, the LPG clientele is mostly dominated by businesses like hotels, institutions and the well-to-do urban people.

The last three successive integrated household living conditions surveys indicate that the figures of households using firewood as main cooking fuel moved to 83.3 per cent from 88.2 per cent over the past five years. This is blamed partly on the low uptake of alternative cooking fuels namely gas, peat and biogas alongside a number of improved cooking stove initiatives that failed to have a substantial impact.

Lack of support

Tekutangije, a local energy-saving cook stove and Amizero which produced briquettes targeting medium fuel consumers like bakeries, restaurants and homes were hailed as promising at the start but later struggled citing lack of support.

“We made briquettes hoping to publicise them especially to low-income earners who are incurring huge costs buying charcoal and wood, but due to lack of support we stopped, Our machines are lying idle at the plant and the investment has become useless,” said Floride Mukarubuga, executive secretary of Amizero.

Experts argue that most initiatives don’t get enough support to win consumers’ hearts in terms of convenience, cost and efficiency. Besides, there has also been a lack of technologies that are appropriate for households at different levels of income.

Amini Mutaganda, head of Forestry Department at Rwanda Natural Resources Authority however said the weakness was due to the fact that many of the alternatives require huge investment and much technical know-how which they don’t get to for a significant impact.

“Apart from scenarios, we haven’t assessed the contribution of the available cooking alternatives on reducing the pressure on demand for wood. Our forests are extremely strained by the growing domestic use of wood and charcoal,” he said.

Mr Mutaganda said the government, through a task force led by the Infrastructure Ministry, is considering identifying the most effective cooking fuel alternatives available on the market so that they can be recommended for promotion alongside biogas and LPG.

The latest figures from the Natural Resources Ministry show that the annual demand for woody biomass is twice the available sustainable productivity. The slow transition to alternative cooking energy could therefore hinder government’s efforts to halve the share of traditional biomass energy consumption by 2020, and pledges to transition to a low carbon economy by 2030.