9. Gas
Distribution
There is a cage at one edge of Goudoubo refugee camp that is made of red metal. One day when the research team passed by, they found children climbing on it, like a piece of playground equipment. Across the top of the cage a banner said ‘ORYX GAZ’. This is the camp’s liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) distribution facility. On this occasion it contained nothing but a few empty canisters. A cluster of people, mostly women, stood around, waiting for refuelled cylinders, but nobody had any clear idea when or if they would arrive.
Gas is the fuel of choice in Goudoubo. For the women standing around the distribution cage, the benefits are obvious. Gas is cleaner than wood and does not produce smoke. It is safe; users do not need to roam at the far reaches of the camp scavenging for it like they do for firewood. And it is efficient, reducing the time they spend cooking and tending fires, or allowing them to simultaneously perform multiple tasks. In 2016, UNHCR trialled the distribution of LPG in Goudoubo as an alternative to firewood for domestic use. This chapter reflects on how the inhabitants of the camp viewed the initiative.
For women, the benefits are obvious. Gas is cleaner than wood and does not produce smoke. It is safe; users do not need to roam at the far reaches of the camp scavenging for it like they do for firewood. And it is efficient, reducing the time they spend cooking and tending fires, or allowing them to simultaneously perform multiple tasks.
Following gas is difficult. It has an odour but it is invisible. People cannot touch, handle or interact with it directly. Instead, they interact with it via the cylinder: a crucial technology for the storage, transportation and combustion of gas. This chapter follows the cylinders, using these to unpick the distribution networks associated with gas, and reflecting on the futures of energy technologies in contexts of humanitarianism and forced displacement.
The LPG pilot in Goudoubo was run by Hilfe zur Selbsthilfe (HELP), one of 14 non-governmental organizations working in partnership with UNHCR to deliver basic health services, nutrition, education, shelter, energy, water and sanitation to refugees in the camp. By September 2017, single-unit 6 kg Oryx gas cylinders had been distributed to 961 households, or just under one-third of the camp.
Before launching its distribution operation HELP conducted a survey. This identified trial users who would receive a gas stove, a 6 kg refillable gas cylinder and formal training. Some of the camp’s residents, mostly those who came from Mali, had used gas before but for many this would be a new experience. The survey also allowed HELP to calculate likely patterns of gas demand in an average household and to estimate the number of days that it would take until a bottle of gas runs out. The aim was to avoid refugees waiting a long time before having their cylinders refilled. HELP estimated that a gas cylinder would last approximately 17 days for a family of six to seven people.
Based on this estimation, HELP negotiated a contract for collection, refuelling and distribution with a Burkinabe supplier in Dori. But while the organization focused its preliminary research on the point of consumption and on end-users, it appears to have under-examined the motivations and interests of other actors in the supply chain.
Refills
Yaya and Timi (see Chapter 5) were among the camp’s pilot LPG users. Like others, they adapted the canister for use with materials scavenged from across the camp. Yaya built a windbreak for it out of sheet metal repurposed from an abandoned solar cooker, fixing this around the canister.
For most trial users, it took about one week to use up the gas in their 6 kg canister. But, for people learning to use a new technology, the rate at which gas was used up was not just about cooking. Stories circulate in the camp of friends and neighbours who had ‘lost the gas’ in their canisters because they did not fully tighten the valve on the top of the bottle.
Once empty the gas canisters do little except take up space waiting to be refilled. They are much harder to re-purpose than solar cookers. Though the gas has value, the canister is the bottleneck. Empty canisters had to be returned to the distribution centre, where they could be eventually retrieved by the gas company and taken away to be refilled. UNHCR expected this process to be regular and timely but, soon after the pilot began, participants began reporting severe delays before the canisters were refilled.
Without refilled gas canisters, people had to revert to the use of old technologies, cooking on open fires using firewood or charcoal. Every time Yaya and Timi’s gas canisters emptied, for example, they experienced a lag before they were refilled. During each waiting period, Timi would go out beyond the camp in search of firewood and return to cook on their stove.
Running on empty
The original contract between HELP and the local supplier had been intended to ensure that refugees could recharge each bottle of gas without delay and that the collection, refuelling and distribution of canisters could proceed as efficiently as possible. ‘There need to be 100 filled bottles stored in the camp’s gas distribution facility to ensure some continuity in gas supply and avoid any delivery break,’ the local HELP representative said.
In practice there were problems. ‘The main problem is that the local supplier in Dori has financial difficulties and cannot pre-purchase new gas bottles from Oryx in Ouagadougou,’ the representative explained. ‘When the supplier comes to collect empty canisters he doesn’t replace them immediately with refilled ones. Instead, he takes the empty bottles back to Ouagadougou and has them refilled there. That means we have to have at least 50 empty canisters in the camp before we can call the supplier to collect them. Otherwise he refuses to come because it’s not profitable for him.’ On occasion, the supplier refused to come and collect even 50 canisters. On one occasion HELP’s representative collected somewhere between 400 and 450, more than half the total in the camp, before the local supplier agreed to collect and transport them to Ouagadougou for refuelling.
Bottlenecks
To some critical observers in the humanitarian energy sector, the failure of the gas distribution system in Goudoubo was a failure of planning. The project was not based on a proper assessment of the distribution logistics or an evaluation of the incentives that might motivate different actors. Those spoken to for this paper describe this failure in terms of a mismatch between values and expectations, which created friction in trade and bottlenecks in the flow of goods.
Following the canister makes these differences strikingly apparent. For camp residents a canister has value when it is full. When given the option, displaced people in Goudoubo clearly articulate their preference for gas over other forms of fuel for cooking. A full canister allows for new rhythms of daily life. It disrupts gendered patterns of work and domestic labour around the collection of firewood (see Chapter 4), promises to transform a culture of shame around soot (see Chapter 3), and creates new opportunities for creative innovation (see Chapter 5). An empty canister interrupts this new dynamic, returning people to established relationships and practices.
Not all actors in the network share the same values, however. The gas suppliers have an inverse relationship to the canister; a canister has most value for them when it is empty and needs to be refilled. This value connects the local distributor in Dori, who can only secure new full canisters by depositing empty ones or by paying a deposit, to Oryx, the gas supply company in Ouagadougou, which seeks to guarantee the continued return and re-use of its canisters. In this supply chain the local distributor is a crucial intermediary, the link between Oryx and the camp. The distributor’s business hinges on the movement of canisters between Goudoubo and Ouagadougou, and it seeks to recoup the cost of transportation and secure a profit by minimizing the number of journeys.
HELP was left to manage the fragile balance between fuel utility, consumption and delivery. It struggled to enforce contracts with suppliers and to manage the time lag between an empty and a full canister.
Energy access and market futures
Against the backdrop of increased interest in market-based approaches to the delivery of humanitarian energy services, this chapter provides a timely reminder that markets do not always work as expected. In this example, the interests of market actors – like the local distributors of gas canisters – were ultimately at odds with the interests of the intended beneficiaries – the refugees. For a time, attempts to deliver gas to displaced people in Goudoubo met people’s expectations. When people took delivery of a full canister of gas, the relationships between consumers, intermediaries and suppliers worked. When empty canisters of gas remained uncollected in the camp these relationships broke down.
There is no guarantee that the introduction of newer, cleaner energy technologies, like LPG or solar panels, into the lives of displaced people will mark a permanent break or shift in their lived experience of fuel or electricity. On the contrary, as UNHCR’s experiment with gas in Goudoubo shows, sustained and continued access to modern energy technologies is dependent on logistics, infrastructure and crucial ‘last-mile’ distributors whose role is often unacknowledged and unreported. Understanding and engaging with these wider systems is crucial to the success of humanitarian energy interventions.
The capacity of organizations to ensure the continued supply of technologies in places like Goudoubo will ultimately owe as much to their understanding of the motivations and interests of intermediaries in the supply chain as it would to their knowledge of the needs and aspirations of end-users.