This project investigates how a close understanding of human activity can inform the design of culturally and contextually sustainable innovations for subsistence markets. Building on existing literature related to poverty alleviation initiatives and using a mainly ethnographic research approach, this project attempted to understand the cultural and contextual challenges to the substitution of unhealthy and unsustainable biomass as cooking fuels by cleaner and competitive cooking alternatives in Kitintale, an urban slum in Kampala, Uganda. This project suggests that everyone’s choice is shaped by a triad of forces – daily living circumstances, evolutionary aspirations and cultural references – and that the weight assigned to each of the forces varies according to the immediacy of needs, access to resources and capacity to plan for the future experienced by individuals in different contexts. Moreover, it concludes that, while the living circumstances faced by impoverished groups might be a valid arrangement to generally describe contextually vulnerable groups, cultural references and evolutionary aspirations might be entirely different depending on the geographic and historic background of the group for which a solution is being designed.