Abstract
Clean cookstove interventions largely fail to achieve their stated aims. In our view, the underlying flaw of many cooking interventions is a systemic lack of attention to users’ rank ordering of product features and contexts of use during the product design process. Drawing on examples of cookstove and product design, together with our experience in cookstove design, research and product standards development, we offer four suggestions for improving cookstove interventions. First, consider the benefits of incremental changes. Second, do not define the problem or the solution too quickly. Third, make no assumptions about how well you know the end user. Fourth, bring users, donors, manufacturers and implementing agencies into the design process. We conclude with a call for an inclusive approach to designing cookstove interventions that is centred around the lived experiences of users and rooted in context-specific knowledge.
Highlights
Public health experts agree that “dirty cooking” over open fires or primitive cooking stoves is an ever-present health hazard in low income contexts
Numerous initiatives have proposed that the problems of stove and fuel replacement interventions can be addressed with new designs, testing protocols, metrics or better information [1,2,4,5]; in our view these are necessary but not sufficient to realize better intervention outcomes
After years of involvement with designing, researching and producing product standards for cooking appliances, we believe that a better combination of behaviour, engineering and intervention per spectives is required to overcome the underlying flaw for why cook stove interventions have failed to stimulate broad adoption. This un derlying flaw relates to a systemic lack of attention to users’ rank ordering of product features and contexts of use – adequately captured using appropriate metrics – during the product design process
Summary
The persistence of “dirty cooking” globally and the obvious need for “improved stoves” appears to be a straightforward supply problem with a specification and procurement solution. Though donors and implementing agencies felt their interventions had addressed “the problem,” the allmetal “wood-burning” stoves they promoted failed to make women safer from violence and embodied a testing blind spot in terms of fuel consumption, health, and the environmental consequences of cooking with charcoal [9]. This situation is by no means unusual. Projects select the new and exciting technology, unproven in the field, on the basis of technical parameters and with the assumption that “people will adapt to the technology.” This could be why so few improved cooking stove interventions achieve their stated social and technical objectives [1,2]
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