Sub-Saharan Africa will miss the UN’s 2030 goal to provide clean cooking for all at today’s pace, with universal access now more realistic by 2040 due to large gaps in financing and infrastructure as well as rapid population growth, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has said.
In a progress report released last Friday, the Paris-based body said the number of Africans without access to clean cooking on the continent has continued to grow, reaching around 1 billion people and affecting four in every five households.
IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a statement that lack of clean cooking “remains one of the great injustices in the world”.
Based on current policies and trends, Daniel Wetzel, head of the IEA’s unit to track sustainable transitions, estimated that “hundreds of millions will still lack access to clean cooking by 2030”. He told Climate Home in emailed comments that only three unspecified countries in sub-Saharan Africa are now on course to reach clean cooking for all their people by 2050 – 20 years after the original deadline.
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Under the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed by UN member states, countries are supposed to make clean cooking available to everyone by 2030.
Mohamed Adow, founder of Kenya-based think-tank Power Shift Africa, described the IEA’s report as a stark reflection of “a deep political failure – promises made, but barely delivered”.
Providing clean cooking in Africa will require stronger focus and coordinated action from governments, industry and development partners, said Birol, adding that “the problem is solvable with existing technologies, and it would cost less than 0.1% of total energy investment globally”.
In May 2024, at a Paris summit on clean cooking in Africa, governments and companies committed to providing $2.2 billion by 2030 to help the continent move away from polluting cooking fuels like charcoal and firewood – which cause damage to health and ecosystems – to cleaner and more efficient options. So far, $470 million of those promises has been delivered, the IEA said.
These funding pledges, however, only represent a fraction of what is needed to solve the problem. The IEA’s new report found that reaching universal access in Africa will require $37 billion in cumulative investment to 2040, or roughly $2 billion per year.
A new pathway
The share of the population with clean cooking access in sub-Saharan Africa is due to rise from around 23% today to 62% by mid-century on today’s trajectory, the report said, adding that sub-Saharan Africa overall is not on track to achieve universal access to clean cooking even by 2050.
In light of this, the IEA recommended a new pathway to achieving the goal by 2040. In its analysis, it looked at countries that have made remarkable progress over the past two decades – including India, Indonesia and China – and how their specific efforts shaped by national priorities, infrastructure capacities, and geographic conditions have helped them achieve access as high as 80-90%.
Based on national factors – from clean cooking policies to income levels and infrastructure development – the IEA said that if guided by best practices in other developing economies, African countries could make similar progress and achieve universal coverage by 2040.
Working to the 2030 SDG deadline would require 160 million people in Africa to gain access annually until 2030. But with the later 2040 target, that figure would be halved to 80 million annually – which the IEA says is more feasible and comparable to historical rates observed in success stories in Asia.
LPG and carbon credits to drive access
Its report found that since 2018, most of the progress recorded was driven by switching to cookstoves running on liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), accounting for three-quarters of the nearly 80 million people in sub-Saharan Africa who adopted cleaner cooking.
According to the IEA analysis, gas will increasingly play a role through to 2040, providing access for over 60% of newly connected households, while the rest will use growing shares of electricity, bioethanol, biogas and advanced biomass cookstoves.
Direct investments in LPG reached $590 million in 2023 but funding for other clean cooking solutions has lagged. In the same year, investments in non-gas options totalled $83 million – a drop from $192 million recorded in 2020, the IEA said.
Carbon credits have also helped drive access to clean cooking in Africa over the past decade, according to the report, moving the continent’s cookstove market from one heavily reliant on development finance to one increasingly supported by carbon markets.
Campaigners have pushed back against the use of LPG and carbon credits to drive clean cooking access, arguing they are false solutions that risk locking Africa into dirty fuels and perpetuating pollution by historic emitters.
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Power Shift’s Adow said it was “outrageous” that millions of Africans are still exposed to toxic fumes from dirty cooking fuels, while funding is diverted to gas infrastructure and carbon market schemes.
He warned that Africa is facing a public health emergency on an epic scale and criticised donor countries for prioritising carbon markets over practical clean cooking solutions. “This is not climate leadership, it’s climate avoidance,” he said, stressing that continued inaction risks deepening poverty, worsening gender inequality, and stalling meaningful climate progress.
“Africa deserves genuine solidarity and serious investment – not smoke and mirrors,” he said.
The IEA’s Wetzel said there had been legitimate concerns about the integrity of some carbon credits but that the industry has developed “improved methodologies with stricter guardrails to ensure credits better reflect actual emissions reductions”. Stronger transparency, better data, and continuous monitoring will be key going forward, he added.
Inclusive clean cooking transition
Cooking with smoky fuels has been linked to 815,000 premature deaths annually in Africa alone, due to the health impacts of household air pollution, the IEA noted. Women and girls bear the brunt, spending four hours a day on average gathering fuel for cooking, often harming their health and foregoing education or paid work as a result, the report said.
Grace Pila, a widow in the rural Bodo community in Nigeria’s Niger Delta, told Climate Home News in March that she can no longer see at a distance nor read her bible due to poor eyesight caused by dirty fuels. She has cooked with firewood since she was a child but began noticing a deterioration of her eyesight two years ago, she said.
She continues to use wood for cooking “because I have nothing else”. “I don’t have gas or solar in my house – I know about them but I cannot afford them,” she said, adding that “the government can help us so I can stop using firewood”.
IEA chief Birol said more unified action is needed to tackle the problem and 2025 could be a turning point for Africa “if we build on the commitments made at our landmark summit”.
Lerato Mataboge, the African Union’s commissioner for infrastructure and energy, told journalists at the report’s launch event, that efforts remain “inefficient and insufficient” to address the scale of the crisis. The continued inaction, she said, costs the continent over $791 billion each year due to the compounding effects of gender inequality, poor health and climate change.
Diverse funding sources, including climate finance, need to be mobilised to make clean cooking affordable and to develop value chains, she said.
“We must build national baskets of fuels based on local resources to ensure a just and inclusive clean cooking transition,” Mataboge added.
