Determinants of sustained adoption of improved cookstoves

Cooking on biomass fuels poses one of the greatest known environmental health threats, causing 3.9 million premature deaths per year. While cleaner cookstoves can reduce indoor pollution, most cookstove programs experience consistently low adoption rates and lack the data to explain why. This project measures objective adoption of cookstoves in a camp for internally displaced persons in Darfur, Sudan. While 95% of respondents self-reported that the improved cookstove was their “primary cookstove,” findings show that only 71% of participants were cookstove users. However, after a follow-up survey, participants who rarely or never used their cookstoves increased adoption by 83%. Researchers hypothesize that this is due to cookstove familiarization and social conformity.