Cooking in the Twin Transition: Digitally Mediated Clean Energy Access in Kigali, Rwanda

The “twin transition”, the coupled pursuit of decarbonisation and digitalisation, has become a dominant policy and investment frame, yet its household-level consequences remain underspecified, particularly in clean-cooking programmes increasingly governed through digital payment rails, platform service systems, and data-driven targeting. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Kigali, this study indicates that digitalisation is not a neutral enabler of clean cooking; it reshapes the practical conditions under which clean energy options become usable, trustworthy, and socially legitimate. Households considering LPG, electricity, and efficient appliances weigh not only price and thermal performance but also digitally produced frictions and risks, including the ability to transact via mobile money at mealtime, the cadence of PAYG repayments, the evidentiary demands and responsiveness of platform-mediated customer care, and the clarity of datafied eligibility rules. These conditions are unevenly distributed within households and often operate as gendered constraints on autonomy, while prepaid visibility can heighten the reputational costs of service interruption when systems fail mid-cook. The paper advances a practice-based account of the twin transition by showing how digital infrastructures shape clean-cooking trajectories through access preconditions, platform-mediated accountability, prepaid visibility that moralises interruption, and inclusion–surveillance trade-offs. The findings suggest that equitable program design requires reducing procedural burden, treating customer care as core infrastructure, minimising mid-cook failure, and evaluating transitions based on cooking sequences and reliability rather than device ownership or connection metrics.