If you need $20 dollars spare as the first step, and to continue to use electricity to power the thing as the second - it isn't accessible. Also - did it even cross your mind that if they could afford it, they would get one? It's not like rice cookers are this secret tool only a select few know about..
Seriously, I get that it can be hard to imagine conditions we haven't personally experienced, but it can't be that hard to understand what "dirt poor" actually means, nor to accept that poor people aren't poor by choice, nor are they surviving on cereals because they have better options they're just not utilising as well as you think you would in their shoes, which you are not, and clearly have never been, in.