About three billion people worldwide use solid fuels for cooking and space heating. This fueling practice contributes to global forest depletion and disease prevalence. To abate the environmental and health threats caused by the inefficient burning of biomass fuels, large-scale initiatives were undertaken globally for the dissemination of fuel-saving and energy-efficient stoves, known as improved cookstoves (ICS). This paper examines the adoption of ICS in northwest Pakistan by using a logit analysis. The results show that the education of the respondent, number of working household members, and total income of the household had significant effects on the adoption of ICS. Conversely, the age of the respondent and possession of land did not exhibit any significant influence on adoption. The overall model was significant with p < 0.001 which reveals that the selected socioeconomic variables have a statistically significant relationship with the adoption of ICS. The paper concludes that the efforts to improve health and environmental conditions may be more successful if ICS programs take the socioeconomic, contextual, and market related factors into account. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.