Under Today's Policies, Access to Clean Cooking in Africa is not set to Improve

Today, 2.3 billion people worldwide - nearly one third of the global population - still cook their meals over open fires or on basic stoves, breathing in harmful smoke released from burning coal, charcoal, firewood, agricultural wastes, and animal dung. These practices can still be found in 128 countries today - where households do not have the tools or means to reliably cook meals using clean burning fuels. Even the simplest, widely available cooking devices could improve this situation, including devices like camp stoves using liquefied petroleum gases (LPG) and electric hotplates.

Thanks to progress in Asia and Latin America, the number of people without access to clean cooking has been declining, but in sub-Saharan Africa, that number has never stopped growing. The number of people globally without clean cooking fell from 3 billion in 2010 to 2.3 billion in 2022. China, India and Indonesia all halved their populations without clean cooking access. These efforts relied largely on providing free stoves and subsidised canisters of of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). During the same period, the number of people without clean cooking access continued to grow in sub-Saharan Africa, where clean cooking campaigns did not to keep pace with population growth. Today, 1 billion people on the continent-roughly four in every five - rely on highly polluting cooking fuels used in open fires or basic stoves.

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