Overview
ISO/TR 19915:2023 - "Clean cookstoves and clean cooking solutions - Guidelines for social impact assessment" is an informative ISO technical report that provides guidance to evaluate the social impacts of improved cooking energy systems. It explains concepts, definitions (e.g., cooking system, baseline, DALY), result chains, and practical tools and metrics to measure direct and indirect social outcomes arising from adoption and sustained use of improved cookstoves and clean cooking solutions.
Keywords: ISO/TR 19915:2023, clean cookstoves, social impact assessment, improved cooking energy systems, clean cooking solutions.
Key Topics
This document focuses on measuring and interpreting social impacts associated with clean cooking, including:
- Impact categories
- Gender impacts and empowerment
- Socioeconomic impacts (household finance, employment, entrepreneurship)
- Time use and perceived well‑being
- Health impacts (accidents, burns, poisoning, exposure to emissions)
- Environmental and food‑security linkages (descriptive)
- Measurement and metrics
- Guidance on baseline definition and data collection
- Metrics and assessment methodologies for gender, finance, time use, well‑being
- Approaches to quantify exposure to smoke and health outcomes, including notes on calculating averted DALYs
- Tools for assessing accidents, safety and self‑reported health outcomes
- Concepts and system view
- Use of the term “improved cooking energy system” to include stove, fuel, behaviour, ventilation and utensils
- Recognition of stove and fuel stacking and its effect on impact realization
- Results chains
- Example simplified and aspirational causal linkages to help design impact evaluations
Note: ISO/TR 19915:2023 is informative (technical report) and provides guidance and methods rather than normative prescriptions.
Applications
ISO/TR 19915:2023 is practical for stakeholders needing robust social impact assessment frameworks:
- Researchers designing impact evaluations and academic studies
- Development organisations and NGOs implementing cookstove programs
- Government bodies setting monitoring and evaluation approaches
- Private sector companies and product designers assessing social outcomes
- Donors, investors and impact funders tracking socioeconomic and health returns
Typical uses: establishing baselines, selecting gender‑sensitive indicators, choosing metrics for time‑use studies, estimating health benefits from reduced exposure, and designing monitoring frameworks that account for stove/fuel stacking.
Related Standards
- ISO 19867 - Harmonized laboratory testing of cookstoves (performance testing)
- ISO 19869 - Field testing methods for cooking energy systems (real‑world performance and use)
These companion standards cover technical performance and field use; ISO/TR 19915 complements them by focusing on social impact assessment and measurement approaches for clean cooking solutions.