Household energy preferences for cooking in urban Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

An extensive survey on household expenditures in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, was used to analyze the factors determining urban household energy choices using a multinomial logit model. Wood-energy remains the preferred fuel of most urban households in the country; though rational, the choice is not sustainable as it portends a threat to the savanna woodlands and the economy. Many important policies have been adopted by public authorities to minimize household wood-energy consumption and to substitute it by alternative fuel. Despite the magnitude of all these policies, the depletion rate of the forest resource is increasing. A kind of inertia is thus observed for household preferences for cooking fuel. This model analyzes the sociological and economic variables of household energy preferences for cooking in Ouagadougou. The analyses show that the inertia of household cooking energy preferences are due to poverty factors such as low income, poor household access to electricity for primary and secondary energy, low house standard. household size, high frequency of cooking certain meals using woodfuel as cooking energy. The descriptive analyses show that the domestic demand for wood-energy is strongly related to household income. The firewood utilization rate decreases with increasing household income. In other words, this fuel appears as a "transition good" for these households which aim for other sources of energy for cooking that are more adapted for urban consumption. This implies that a price subsidy policy for liquid petroleum gas (LPG) and its cook stoves could significantly decrease the utilization rate of wood-energy. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.