The African Development Bank Group (AfDB) has called for clean cooking to be treated as a development imperative and a collective responsibility, urging governments and partners to place it at the heart of Africa’s energy transition.
The call came during the High-Level Heads of State Event on Clean Cooking in Africa, held Tuesday 23rd September during the 81st United Nations General Assembly (UNGA81) in New York. Convened by Kenya and Norway, in collaboration with the International Energy Agency, the Clean Cooking Alliance and UN Energy, it was the first time that clean cooking has taken the center stage in the UN General Assembly’s history.
The event brought together heads of state, ministers, multilateral development banks, United Nations agencies and other partners, to raise political ambition and accelerate progress toward universal access to clean cooking across Africa.
Nearly one billion Africans still lack access to clean cooking, forcing many households to rely on wood, charcoal and other traditional biomass fuels that contribute to indoor air pollution, deforestation and lost productivity. Women and children are disproportionately affected, bearing the greatest health risks and spending hours collecting fuel that could otherwise be used for education, work and enterprise.
President William Ruto of Kenya, who addressed the event, said clean cooking should be integrated into national planning across African governments. Kenya will host the second Summit on Clean Cooking in Africa in Nairobi in January 2027, where leaders and partners are expected to convert the political momentum generated in New York into concrete investment commitments and implementation plans.
AfDB Senior Vice President Marie-Laure Akin-Olugbade, who represented President Sidi Ould Tah, said clean cooking could no longer be treated as a secondary issue in the energy transition. “How a family cooks affects health, forests, productivity, gender equality, and the daily lives of millions of women and children in Africa,” she said. “It is therefore not a marginal issue; it is central to development, climate action and human dignity.”
Mission 300 — the joint initiative between the AfDB and the World Bank Group to connect 300 million Africans to electricity by 2030 — has helped shift the conversation on household energy access, Akin-Olugbade said. She said all 36 National Energy Compacts adopted to date by African countries within the initiative now include clean cooking ambitions, with countries pursuing a range of pathways including improved cookstoves, liquefied petroleum gas, electric cooking, biogas, bioethanol and briquettes.
Following the first Summit on Clean Cooking in Africa in 2024, the Bank Group committed to channel USD 2 billion over ten years to clean cooking. It has already channelled approximately USD 135 million to clean cooking projects — a ten-fold increase compared with its cumulative financing for the sector before the 2024 Summit.
The Bank Group’s support is already visible across the continent. In Uganda, it is supporting the deployment of biogas plants and subsidies that make efficient electric cooking appliances more affordable. In Tanzania, electric cooking devices are being integrated into wider electrification investments. In Rwanda, results-based financing is designed to expand access to clean cooking technologies for 100,000 households and 300 institutions.
The Bank Group is also expanding concessional and catalytic finance for clean cooking through the Rome Process/Mattei Plan Financing Facility and the Africa Clean Cooking Program under the Sustainable Energy Fund for Africa.
The session was marked by high-level interventions, including Ireland announcing a pledge of EUROS 300,000 to support the work of the Clean Cooking Alliance.
“Success will not be measured by the dollars we invest, but by the lives we improve,” Akin-Olugbade said. “Clean cooking must become a central pillar of Africa’s energy transition — one that demands political leadership, sustained financing and collective action at scale.”
