Five Shifts for Cookstoves

About

Clean cookstoves have the potential to improve health by reducing exposure to smoke from traditional fires and stoves, improve livelihoods through increased savings from reduction of fuel use, and benefit the environment through a decrease in emissions. Despite the significant improvements in cookstove technology in recent years, there has been too little attention paid to the habits, motivations, and aspirations of cookstover users. As a result, clean cookstove adoption in countries like Tanzania has been low.

Using an intensive human-centered design approach, IDEO.org worked with the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves to identify opportunities to increase demand for clean cookstoves in Tanzania and beyond. The ultimate result was a strategy document which details five user-inspired shifts, that along with initial concepts, are intended to help the cookstove industry reframe its focus from the technology to the cook.

A project of IDEO.org