"Technological innovation is just one string in the bow. For development to be effective we need to take the bigger picture into account."

This is how Nigel Vaz sums up his three-month-long stay at Nepal last year, where he had gone as an EWB UK volunteer to work on a biogas project but ended up designing an awareness programme for increasing the access of the poor to the locally suitable Improved Cooking Stoves.

Nigel, an engineering graduate from Cambridge University with a specialization in civil and environmental engineering, went on an EWB UK bursary to work with RECED (Renewable Energy for Clean Environment and Development), a newly established NGO based in Nepal, on a biogas project.

"Although, I did an impact study of biogas, I soon moved to improved cooking stoves because I realized that biogas was too expensive and was not reaching everyone. Improved Cooking Stoves or ICS were much cheaper, could be prepared from local resources and did their job," says Nigel. "Moreover, it was an established technology," he adds.

The problem, however, was different. Although the technology existed, poor people did not have access to it. "I decided to find out why and ensure that it reached all," says Nigel.

One of the reasons was that despite being hardly 10$ per stove, people still could not afford it. "Interestingly," says Nigel, "Although ICS was a government supported programme, they would still not subsidize it for the poor."

Secondly, there was not enough awareness about the ICS among the poor. "The dissemination of these stoves was enterprise based and so local distributors had no interest in promoting it to the really poor and unaware population," says Nigel.

Thirdly, a rigid caste system came in the way of the poor having access to ICS. "Transfer of information takes place along informal social lines. In the existing social structure, it would take a very pro-active approach to ensure that it reached lower caste people as the rich and powerful, who had both access and control, belonged to the upper caste," adds Nigel.

Despite being a government run programme—Energy Sector Assistance Programme under the Alternate Energy Promotion Centre—the attitude of the government towards the poor was very detached, according to him.

In order to make the technology effective by ensuring that it reached all, Nigel spoke to people across the spectrum to get a sense of the divide and to convince them the priority "was to do something for those who did not have access to it". After consulting with RECED and successfully convincing powerful locals, Nigel set out to work an awareness campaign.

"I decided that the programme had to raise awareness by visiting every house in the village, by giving live demonstrations, thorugh outreach activities at schools, by training people to build stoves and by monitoring quality control," says Nigel.

Scheduled to start in January this year with a time frame of six months, Nigel facilitated a second internship in the summer of 2008 to follow up on the campaign. "Although, it is going at a much slower pace than planned, our internships are giving it the necessary push," says Nigel. "I personally plan to follow it up with an impact study in two years time," he adds.

So how does his technical skills add up with all this? "My background as an engineer provided me with a lot of useful skills for this project but it was primarily a development project," says Nigel. "I do not see myself predominantly as an engineer. Technical innovation is just one aspect of development, for development to benefit all, it needs to be integrated into the larger social context," he adds.

Taking on from there, Nigel is currently interning with Shelter Center at Geneva. Here too, the focus is not specifically technical but involves bringing together people working on shelter in the humanitarian sector to come up with common guidelines on settlement of displaced people.

"It will be a wonderful opportunity to be immersed in the developmental world in Geneva, learn from there, and see what comes out of it," he sums up.

You can view some of Nigel's photos from Nepal via this link