To promote adoption of household health technologies, think beyond health

PESD associate director Mark Thurber and research collaborators at Stanford have found in a review of the medical and public health literatures that health improvement is rarely the principal reason why households adopt health-improving technologies like insecticide-treated nets, point-of-use water treatments, and improved biomass cookstoves. These findings, which appear in the American Journal of Public Health, suggest that wider health impact can be achieved by paying more attention to non-health motivations for adoption.