Consider yourself privileged if you woke up this morning and made breakfast on a stove that did not emit smoke. A third of the world’s population, 2.3 billion people, do not have access to clean energy for cooking, which means they cook their meals over open fires or on basic stoves, inhaling harmful emissions from burning firewood, agricultural waste, charcoal, and animal dung.
In many parts of the world, cooking tasks disproportionately fall on women, making them particularly vulnerable to inhaling harmful smoke from these stoves. This exposure to indoor air pollution is responsible for millions of premature deaths annually among women and children. Therefore, reflecting on these issues on International Women’s Day 2024 is essential. Although not a new problem, some parts of the world, like India and China, have already made significant strides in addressing it.
Achieving universal clean cooking is crucial not only for public health but also for environmental sustainability. It could save as much as 1.5 Gt CO2-equivalent annually by 2030, roughly equivalent to the carbon emissions from all the planes and ships today.
Financing has been identified as a key constraint in scaling up access to clean cooking, with as much as $8 billion needed annually—currently, it stands at $2.5 billion—with funds most required in the rural areas and in several regions of Sub-Saharan Africa—countries such as Burundi and Sierra Leone have clean cookstove access rates of less than 10%. While financing is essential, understanding where finance should flow is equally important, which could benefit both the private sector and other key stakeholders.
Key Financing Areas For Access To Clean Cooking
Carbon credits can be a useful financial instrument to fund initiatives in this sector. However, carbon credits for clean cooking projects represent only a fraction of the funding in the carbon credit space. Of the 1.8 billion carbon credits issued since 2004, only 5% have been generated from clean cooking. Companies in industrialized countries purchase carbon credits to help them meet climate targets by financing projects in non-industrialized countries. The International Energy Agency, in its recent report on A Vision for Clean Cooking Access for All, has identified carbon credits as a key tool to improve access to clean cooking. Notable challenges exist in the measurements and verification of credits; nevertheless, there is potential for scaling up its use, particularly in rural areas.
Clean cookstove projects in rural areas are considered highly additional, as per the above report. Additionality is an integral principle of these credits, which means emissions reductions or removals would not have occurred without the credit. These credits are generated due to emission reductions from adopting cleaner alternatives to traditional stoves, including improved cookstoves, electric induction stoves, etc.
Liquefied Petroleum Gas, or LPG, is another area expected to attract investment in the medium term—these LPG cookstoves remain the primary fuel to deliver clean cooking access. Roughly 70% of those gaining access to clean cooking since 2010 did so through LPG. In the next few years, as per IEA’s report, almost half of the improvement in access comes from this source. The ease with which LPG cylinders can be used—from bottled cylinders connected to a cookstove—has made it the cleaner fuel of choice for many countries. Last month, Bloomberg reported about Kenya’s $400 Million LPG investment plan, under which Kenya is expanding storage capacity to import LPG centrally and attract private investors to build bulk LPG facilities.
However, governments and other stakeholders know the adverse consequences of overreliance on LPG for energy security. There are warning signs from subsidized LPG distribution in other countries; Indonesia went from being an exporter to a net importer of LPG in 2008. The IEA, in its Clean Cooking Vision, has modeled scenarios for Sub-Saharan African LPG production and consumption for access to clean cooking. The results show that by 2030 if Africa’s gas production and oil refineries continue to produce similar shares of LPG, domestic production would only meet roughly one-quarter of this demand.
There can also be concerns about whether investments in LPG infrastructure—which is fossil-based—at a time when the world is trying to move away from it, represent the right long-term strategy. Could investments in this infrastructure risk becoming stranded? As for the emissions mitigation of fossil-based LPG cookstoves, the clean cooking vision does note that moving to LPG from traditional cookstoves leads to a net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. However, the latter question, which is more relevant for the private players, was not discussion and requires more research.
In countries with high access rates to electricity, especially in urban areas, governments are therefore pursuing efforts to scale up electric cooking. For example, Kenya—which has high electricity rates in urban areas—is aggressively expanding electric cooking campaigns in these areas through attractive policy initiatives, such as promoting electric pressure cookers well suited for Kenyan cuisine. It is also considering an electric cooking tariff, which would help avoid consumers adopting electric cooking being bumped up to a more expensive rate class.
Involving Women In The Entire Value Chain
For financing to effectively reach the beneficiaries and foster real progress, more initiatives that involve women in the entire value chain will be beneficial. One study found that women sell three times as many stoves as men. The same study found that women who received dedicated mentorship and entrepreneurial training were significantly more effective in scaling clean cooking.
Another study challenges the oversimplified assumption that merely involving women leads to improved outcomes in clean cooking, highlighting gender-based disparities in the sector. It emphasizes the importance of strategically integrating women into the correct value chain segments to help deliver financial benefits and empowerment to women. While many projects engage women in sales to customers, women-led enterprises remain underrepresented in crucial activities like production and wider retail distribution, where tapping into mass markets could yield higher sales and revenues.
In a few months, the International Energy Agency, in collaboration with the African Development Bank, plans to host a major conference to delve deeper into these issues. We hope this conference will gather all the critical stakeholders to address closing the funding gap of $5.5 billion annually and provide more clarity on the sustainable allocation of the additional funding. We aspire for a future where no one, not even in the poorest regions of the world, puts the life of a woman or child at risk due to inhaling the poisonous fumes from these traditional stoves.
