Development Policy

Tune into two podcasts with Gunther on energy access at the Knowledge Archives and in a discussion with Natalia Realpe Carrillo, Shonali Pachauri, and Sebastian Groh on five years of the Multi-Tier Framework to measure energy access.

What kind of electricity makes sense in rural Africa to make the most of available budgets? Maximiliane and Jörg address this question in a contribution on The Conversation.

An article by Jörg and two colleagues on the use of improved cookstoves as an instrument of effective climate policy was among the ten most read articles of 2020 on VoxDev, a platform for economists, policymakers, practitioners, donors, the private sector and others interested in development to discuss key policy issues.

In this article in the Economist, study results by our team and University of Passau are discusssed in the context of debates about grid extension to rural areas in developing countries as compared to off-grid alternatives.

Under the headline “How the other half cooks“, The Economist features in its print edition from early April a report on the efforts to coax people towards cleaner cooking fuels. The article describes the situation on the ground in rural Senegal, more specifically a study region of one of our ongoing research projects, and discusses findings from our studies on the uptake of improved cookstoves.

In a short article in the peer-reviewed practitioner journal Boiling Point, Gunther and Jörg discuss insights derived from a recent study in Senegal into potential intervention design and communication approaches for entry-level improved stoves.

Der Anschluss ans Stromnetz soll die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung Afrikas vorantreiben. Studien zeigen: Es klappt nicht wie erhofft. Fortschritt bringt der Strom trotzdem. Ein Gastbeitrag auf ZEIT online von Jörg Peters und der RWI-Kollegin Katja Fels.

This blog article discusses findings from a field experiment conducted in rural Rwanda where we evaluated the revealed willingness to pay for different off-grid solar technologies. The discussion feeds into our work as part of the Sustainable Energy Transitions Initiative (SETI) network.

An intense debate continues on how best to provide electricity to the 1.1 billion people currently without access to it – Jörg discusses this topic in a World Bank blogpost together with Michael Toman from the Development Research Group and Energy and Environment Team at World Bank.

Another blog post on the potentials of improved cookstoves at the website of our partners from Environment for Development (EfD).

This week, the WASHplus newsletter features a Q&A on Investments in Cookstoves with Jörg. Check it out.