I was really fascinated by Prof. Blalock’s talk last Wednesday about the problems of cook stoves, but also frustrated to learn how difficult it has proven to find a solution. After listening to the presentation, I found myself feeling that there must be some workable solution. Certainly there are many obstacles to changing people’s behavior–the Prius analogy was very effective in showing what those might be–but I felt that there had to be a way to get around them. Part of me wants to start with the stove itself. As Prof. Blalock told us, the stoves are tricky and inflexible, by nature of the way the wood and the gases burn. Still, I wonder if there isn’t a way to work around those limitations to build a more flexible stove – maybe by making it so that you can adjust the positioning of the food relative to the heat, or by making multiple burners, etc. Even if this made the stoves slightly more expensive, I think if it delivered a product that met people’s needs more effectively it would be worth the price (which hopefully you could offset with greater fundraising efforts on this side). I would hope that if you could deliver a more effective stove, it would change the trend Prof. Blalock observed: that people completely abandoned their stoves after a period of a few years. I think that abandonment was really the most confounding and frustrating part of the story. Why was it that people decided, after some time, to stop using the stoves entirely? Even though they were right there in the kitchen, completely available for use? It must be that somewhere the incentives were wrong. And I suspect that they were wrong in small ways in a number of places: like in the Prius analogy, with the cook stoves there are questions of product effectiveness, social norms, safety concerns, effort required for use, ingrained habit, etc. So likely changing only one thing–like the design of the stove–in itself wouldn’t be enough to solve the problem. Still, I think that the stove itself is probably one of the most important factors (considering that people still didn’t use it even once almost all barriers to their doing so were removed), so that’s where I would start.