The journey to clean cooking: insights from Kenya and Zambia
This working paper describes case studies in Kenya and Zambia that developed ‘user journeys’ to understand how households come to adopt an advanced cookstove, and the factors that support or hinder that process. A shift to advanced cookstoves can bring significant health and environmental benefits, but only with proper and consistent use. Yet empirical evidence of what drives households to adopt advanced cooking technologies is limited. The authors use case studies in peri-urban Kiambu County, Kenya, and urban Lusaka, Zambia, to examine what drives households to adopt clean stoves for most or all of their cooking needs, and to stick with those stoves for the long term. They use a service design methodology to build “user journeys” that illustrate the cook’s experience with the technology, from the point of hearing about it, to purchasing it, learning to use it, and making it part of daily routine