3.7 Advantages and disadvantages of the BAR-HAP Tool

This decision support tool has three principal advantages:

It provides a user-friendly, convenient framework for estimating a set of costs and benefits that a) is more extensive, and b) applies to a wider range of single or multiple-technology cooking transitions (implemented at sub-national or national scales) than can be found in any other comparable planning tool.

Users can modify an extensive range of input parameters based on their knowledge of the best available context-specific data, to develop predictions of the impacts of policy instruments tailored to their location and baseline situations, acknowledging that households do not always make a complete switch to cleaner options.

It can help inform decision-making by providing a range of outputs that may be weighted according to national or regional priorities for maximizing health or development impacts, working within budget constraints.

The BAR-HAP Tool also has important limitations, some of which could be addressed in future work to improve the model:

In its current form, the model is static. It thus does not account for dynamics that increase or decrease population, rates of technology adoption and changes in affordability, or the prevalence or incidence rates of diseases over time.

For the most part, the tool does not factor in changes in health sector implementation costs as the scale of intervention provision (either economies or diseconomies of scale) increases. Only the stove and fuel costs, and promotion program costs scale based on the number of users targeted.

While we include an exposure adjustment factor, we do not incorporate structural characteristics of the household (for which data may not exist at the country level), thereby not considering cross-household heterogeneity.

The contribution of ambient air pollution, which could nullify the effects of HAP reductions from clean cooking, is not accounted for.

Consumers’ preferences for improved and clean cooking scenarios and related policy interventions are not incorporated. A welfare-theoretic perspective on private benefits, for example, would equate these to the area under the demand curve, but BAR-HAP calculations of these private benefits are rather based on valuation equations that pertain to the specific benefits presented in Table 1. These may diverge from individuals’ willingness to pay for those improvements for a range of reasons.

Though their addition would not be a simple task manageable by the majority of users, additional transitions between cooking fuels and technologies could be incorporated into the tool, which is currently limited to the sixteen described above, and as the piloting in Nepal revealed, users in specific contexts are likely to have particular interest in certain types of transitions that may not be included in the current version.