Household-based determinants of cooking and heating fuel mixes in informal settlements of Kisumu City, Kenya

Households in urban informal settlements of Kisumu City use multiple fuels for their cooking and heating. Despite this reality, previous national inventories of fuel choices in these settlements were based on the most preferred fuel rather than the whole fuel composite used by the households. This paper, therefore, examines the fuel combinations that households in informal settlements of Kisumu City use and how their socio-economic characteristics influence their choice of these combinations. The paper is premised on the energy stacking theory. The study sampled 419 households from informal settlements of Kisumu City. Multinomial logistic regression is used to establish correlation between household characteristics and fuel combination choices. The findings show that majority of households in urban informal settlements of Kisumu City use multiple fuels for cooking, with charcoal and liquefied petroleum gas being the most commonly stacked fuels. Education does not have a strong correlation with fuel choices; whereas household size reliably predicts the choice of individual fuels. Household income significantly predicts the adoption of fuel stacks that have liquefied petroleum gas and charcoal. While increase in household income has a positive correlation with adoption of modern fuels, it does not lead to households dropping primitive and transitional fuels from their stacks. The study asserts that the energy stacking theory is a suitable basis for assessing the relationship between household-based socioeconomic determinants and fuel combination choices among residents of SSA cities. The reality of fuel stacking in urban informal settlements requires policies geared towards increasing access to modern household fuel technologies while incentivizing adoption of fuel-efficient biomass stoves.