Determinants of Household’s Willingness to Pay for Improved Mirt Stove in Cases of Semi Urban Areas of Gurage Zone: An Application of Contingent Valuation Method

The households of Ethiopia mainly depend on biomass energy for their day to day activity. This dependency on biomass resource with traditional cook stove contribute to the depletion of environmental resource and health problem specially for women’s and children’s from indoor air pollution. From this the government has been encouraging the uses of improved cook stove technology at the household level. However, the uses of improved cook stove were very low. Hence, this study aims to estimate households WTP for improved Mirt stove and to identify factors that determine their WTP in semi urban areas of Gurage zone using Contingent valuation method and seemingly unrelated Bivariate Probit model. A sample of 251 households was randomly selected. The result of this study shows that households mean WTP is significantly influenced by bid price, monthly household income, family size, age, sex, marital status, environmental awareness, house ownership and availability of children under five year. The mean WTP for improved Mirt stove from the double bounded dichotomous choice format computed using the Krinsky Robb method was estimated to be 234.11 Birr and the total willingness to pay for improved Mirt stove is 3,561,281 birr. From the total surveyed households, 94.6% have shown their willingness to pay if there is an improvement in Mirt stove. Thus, the result can inspire the stakeholders those work in this area to invest for improving the current Mirt stove