Imagining cooking with electricity in 2030

In February 2020, SEI ran a two-day workshop with 30 community members in Kitulu Village in rural Machakos County, Kenya, to understand how people think about transitioning to electrical cooking by 2030.

The team used backcasting, a participatory method of considering future outcomes, as the tool to build the transition road map. People of different ages who did not use electricity for cooking were asked to imagine that it was 2030 and everyone in the community now cooked with electricity. After that, they discussed what would need to happen to get there, and by when.

By the end of the two days, the participants had developed a detailed map for a transition to cooking with clean energy that set out key actions, who needed to take responsibility for what, and what targets and local resources were needed.

Action in the community

At the end of the workshop, one of the older participants said, “NGOs sometimes come here and ask what we would like them to do for us. Sometimes this is a difficult question to answer … so many things are needed. But now we have a roadmap, we can use it to remind ourselves of where we would like to go, and what help we should be asking for.”

Six months after the workshop, SEI carried out a follow-up study with participants to see whether it had led to change, and interviews showed that the community was using the roadmap to take action. Participants had gathered a list of households and asked their local government representative for access to a financial programme for “last-mile” electricity connections. The community had also set up a local savings scheme to cover the costs of wiring up houses for electricity connections and had begun to invest in clean energy appliances like solar lanterns.