Clean Cooking and Women's Health
A Community Governance and Adaptive Accountability Pilot
ASIL's inaugural implementation learning pilot. A 12-month case study in the central question of implementation science: why do known-effective interventions fail during implementation, and what governance architecture makes them durable?
Reference
ASIL-P001-MW-2025
Geography
Malawi — 3 Communities
Duration
12 months · Jun 2026 – May 2027
Expected Report
Q2–Q3 2027
The Central ASIL Question
Why do effective interventions fail during implementation, and what governance architectures translate good interventions into durable outcomes under real community conditions?
Why This Case Study
The evidence is settled
Improved cookstoves reduce exposure to household air pollution, which causes serious respiratory and cardiovascular harm concentrated among women who cook. The technology works. The health case is unambiguous.
The implementation fails
Sustained adoption beyond the sponsored project period is consistently low. Cookstoves are distributed, used briefly, and abandoned. The failure repeats across geographies, implementers and funding sources, decade after decade.
The ASIL question
If the failure is not in the technology or the evidence, it is in the implementation architecture. What governance system, designed deliberately and not assumed, is sufficient to make adoption durable? That is what this pilot tests.
The Central Intervention
Improved cookstove distribution in three Malawian communities, accompanied by a Community Accountability Committee with an explicit equity mandate, a Women's Health Evidence System that puts adoption data in community hands, and a structured quarterly adaptive governance cycle. One intervention. One population. One implementation question.
Pilot Overview
Clean cooking programmes make an ideal ASIL case study precisely because the intervention is not in question. The evidence base for improved cookstoves as a women's health intervention is robust, well-replicated, and uncontested. The failure point is equally well-documented: sustained adoption beyond the period of external support is low, consistently, across contexts.
This means any failure in this pilot is a pure implementation and governance failure: not a technology problem, not an evidence problem. The cookstove is a known-good instrument. The question is whether a deliberately designed community governance architecture can overcome the implementation failure that has frustrated the same instrument for decades.
The pilot tests a specific governance design: a Community Accountability Committee with an explicit equity mandate, a Women's Health Evidence System that puts adoption data in community hands, and a structured quarterly adaptive governance cycle. If this architecture sustains adoption where other programmes have not, it will constitute significant evidence for the central ASIL hypothesis: that governance design is the binding constraint on implementation success for known-good interventions.
Key Learning Questions
Does a purposefully designed community accountability system sustain improved cookstove adoption beyond the sponsored project period, and through precisely what governance mechanisms?
What design features of the Community Accountability Committee (composition, equity mandate, evidence protocols, decision authority) most reliably produce a governance response when adoption stalls?
What role does a community-held Women's Health Evidence System play in sustaining adoption decisions and activating accountability responses at household level?
What does this case study reveal about the governance conditions required to make known-effective community health interventions durable, and what does it imply for how such interventions are designed and governed in other sectors?
Methodology
Community governance design
Three purposively selected communities. Community Accountability Committee established with an explicit equity mandate and defined decision protocols before distribution commences.
Women's Health Evidence System
Community-held adoption tracking system that makes household-level data visible and actionable for the Accountability Committee each quarter.
Quarterly adaptive governance
Structured cycle: evidence review, committee deliberation, targeted follow-up and documented adaptation at each site, each quarter.
Adoption outcome tracking
Consistent use monitoring across targeted households, disaggregated by equity exposure burden and household composition.
Adaptive management log
Documented decision log tracking all pilot adaptations, evidence triggers, and the governance responses they produced.
Ethics clearance
Malawi National Bioethics Committee clearance required prior to field activities. Helsinki Declaration principles apply throughout.
Pilot Timeline
Phase 1 — Design
June – August 2026
Concept note finalisation, ethics submission, community partner engagement, CAC design, site confirmation
Phase 2 — Implementation
September 2026 – February 2027
Cookstove distribution, CAC establishment, WHES activation, quarterly governance cycles, adaptive management
Phase 3 — Evaluation
March – May 2027
Adoption outcome analysis, governance system evaluation, Learning Report drafting
Publication
Q2–Q3 2027
ASIL Learning Report 001 + Implementation Intelligence Brief 001
Primary Domains
Strategic Significance
Because the intervention is known-good, the Learning Report's findings, whether positive or negative, will constitute direct evidence on governance architecture as the binding constraint on implementation success. That learning is applicable across every thematic area ASIL operates in.
Request Pilot Briefing
Full concept note available to institutional partners
Cross-Thematic Evidence
One implementation question. Four thematic domains of evidence.
The central ASIL question does not respect thematic boundaries. This case study generates implementation intelligence across all four of Astellic's thematic domains simultaneously — not by design, but because implementation failure is inherently cross-cutting.
Each domain asks a version of the same question through a different institutional lens. The Learning Report addresses each separately. The synthesis will be the most significant output.
Health & Nutrition Systems
The Domain Question
“Why does a known-effective women's health intervention fail to produce durable health outcomes?”
What the Pilot Tests
The failure is not in the intervention; it is in the governance of adoption. The pilot tests whether a community accountability architecture with an explicit equity mandate can close the gap between a distributed product and a sustained health outcome.
Learning Output
Governance design as the binding constraint on community health intervention durability; equity-disaggregated adoption as a health outcome metric.
Governance & Public Sector Reform
The Domain Question
“What community-level governance architecture is required for sustained public health programme delivery?”
What the Pilot Tests
The Community Accountability Committee design is a governance intervention as much as a health one. The pilot tests whether a structured community accountability mechanism can operationalise an equity mandate in practice, not merely commit to it.
Learning Output
Community governance design as a programme delivery mechanism; conditions under which accountability architecture translates into durable implementation outcomes.
Education & Social Systems
The Domain Question
“What social system conditions determine whether communities adopt and sustain clean cooking behaviour?”
What the Pilot Tests
Cookstove abandonment is partly a social learning failure. The pilot examines the role of information flow, household decision-making structures, and community norm-setting in driving sustained behavioural change.
Learning Output
Social system conditions for sustained behaviour change; community information architecture as a driver of health and energy adoption outcomes.
Climate Agriculture & Sustainability
The Domain Question
“Why do household clean energy transitions fail to persist, and what governance architecture changes that?”
What the Pilot Tests
Cookstove abandonment is a household energy governance failure. As clean energy finance accelerates into communities, the institutional conditions for sustained adoption become critical. This pilot generates direct evidence on what those conditions require.
Learning Output
Governance architecture for durable household energy transitions; institutional conditions for sustained low-carbon behaviour change at community scale.
Why This Design Choice Matters
By anchoring Pilot 001 in a case study where the intervention is already known to work, ASIL eliminates the most common confound in implementation research. If adoption fails, the failure cannot be attributed to the technology or the evidence base; it will be a pure implementation and governance failure. That is the design logic, and it is what makes the Learning Report applicable far beyond clean cooking.
Engage with this Pilot
Pilot 001 is open to institutional partners, implementation collaborators, and academic co-investigators.
ASIL selects collaborators based on intellectual seriousness, institutional alignment, and genuine commitment to evidence standards. All partners are advised that findings will be published as the evidence shows them.
Implementation collaborations
Embed ASIL in live programmes
Academic co-investigation
Joint design and co-authorship
Community partner access
Three sites across Malawi
Data sharing partnerships
Adoption and governance evidence