In the Rose-Becker Cafe on March 9th, 2016, Professor Blalock gave us an overview on his research on how to encourage people in Uganda to adopt eco-stove cooking solution. It was very interesting to learn that some Ugandan natives build their stoves by putting three rocks together and burn biofuel as fuel sources. The picture below shows how it looks like.

Although it looks like a pleasant set up, the Uganda had to walk a long distance to collect the biomass as a large amount is needed in their cooking process. Due to the way the “stove” is designed, heat escape very easily. Also, burning of biomass releases harmful chemicals that can cause lung dysfunction and many other health problems. Ugandans who use these kind of “stoves” may not even live long enough for lung cancer to develop. In order to resolve such problems, one of the alternatives was to encourage the Ugandan to adopt the eco-stove cooking solution, which may look something like the stove shown below.

With the help of programs, such as carbon fund where people donate to offset their carbon footprint(or guilt), the eco-stove were sold to Ugandan for a very affordable cost. They were also offered the options to return, get warranty and financial installments. Although a good number of people bought the stove. Many of the stoves essentially just sit in the Ugandan home without being much used. But why was that? Perhaps, it could be because of conformity. Even though people are concerned about health and efficiency, they may be more concerned about conforming to the norm. Since the Ugandan who adopts the eco-stoves cooking solution are the early-adopters in their country and innovation adoption does not appear to be popular in Uganda, using a strange stove may just appear weird to neighbors. As a result, despite experiencing all the benefits of the eco-stoves, Ugandan may still be very unlikely to use the cooking alternative any time soon.