Pay-as-you-go LPG supports sustainable clean cooking in Kenyan informal urban settlement,including during a period of COVID-19 lockdown

medRxiv

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Abstract: Approximately 2.8 billion people rely on polluting cooking fuels (e.g. wood,kerosene),exposing them to health-damaging household air pollution. A key access barrier to clean cooking fuels (e.g. liquefied petroleum gas (LPG)) is affordability. By enabling households to pay in small increments,pay-as-you-go (PAYG) LPG could help promote clean cooking,and support continued LPG use through periods of economic downturn. We investigate the ability of PAYG LPG to sustain access to clean cooking from January 2018- June 2020,including during COVID19 lockdown (March-June 2020) in an informal settlement in Nairobi,Kenya. We utilize novel PAYG LPG smart meter data to document cooking/spending patterns from 426 PAYG LPG customers and semi-structured interviews among a subset of seven households. Objective cooking pattern comparisons are made to those cooking with full 6kg cylinder LPG and polluting fuel users from 23 households in peri-urban Eldoret in western Kenya,using stove monitoring.