Taste, Time, and Trust in Kigali Kitchens: Ethnographic Insights for Durable Clean-Cooking Adoption

Abstract

Drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in Kigali (January–July 2025), this article explains why many urban households continue to “stack” charcoal, firewood, LPG, and electric appliances despite expanding access to modern options. I advance a practice-proximal framework, Taste, Time, and Trust (T³), that diagnoses where clean-cooking transitions stall and specifies how programmes can convert one-off trials into durable practice. Taste captures sensory expectations and culinary identities that organise what counts as “good food”. Time attends to everyday temporalities, procurement, ignition, monitoring, and cleanup, through which technologies either compress or expand the day. ‘Trust’ refers to reliability, safety, and service ecologies spanning devices, fuels, vendors, technicians, and advice networks. The analysis demonstrates that affordability and availability rarely translate into exclusive use without T³ alignment. The article offers narrative experiences, cross-household patterning, and operational indicators for programme design in Kigali, emphasising cooking co-design, reliability guarantees, whole-household behaviour change communication (BCC), and after-sales ecosystems. The findings respond to persistent gaps in the literature on adoption metrics and stakeholder engagement by centring lived practice and specifying standardisable measures of sustained use.

Affiliated Institutions

• University of Sierra Leone SL

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