The African Development Bank Group (AfDB), the Sub-Saharan Africa’s (SSA’s) leading development finance institution, has charged governments and partners in the continent to to treat clean cooking as a development imperative and a collective responsibility in the current drive towards Africa’s energy transition.
The bank gave the charge to the leaders and partners during the High-Level Heads of State Event on Clean Cooking in Africa, held Tuesday during the 81st United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York.
Convened by Kenya and Norway, in collaboration with the International Energy Agency, the Clean Cooking Alliance and UN Energy, which had in attendance 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, was the first time that clean cooking took the center stage in the UN General Assembly’s history.
Available statistics indicated that nearly one billion Africans still lacked 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.
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The data reflected that women and children were disproportionately affected, bearing the greatest health risks and spending hours collecting fuel that could otherwise be used for education, work and enterprise.
A news report by the African Press Organisation (APO) Group circulated on behalf of the AfDB on the discussions at the meeting, indicated that President William Ruto of Kenya, who addressed the attendees, said clean cooking should be integrated into national planning across African governments.
Kenya is scheduled to 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.
Speaking at the forum, AfDB Group Senior Vice President, Marie-Laure Akin-Olugbade, who represented by the bank’s President, Sidi Ould Tah, said clean cooking could no longer be treated as a secondary issue in the energy transition.
The banker clarified: “How a family cooks affects health, forests, productivity, gender equality, and the daily lives of millions of women and children in Africa. It is therefore not a marginal issue; it is central to development, climate action and human dignity.”
Akin-Olugbade explained that Mission 300 – the joint initiative between the AfDB Group and the World Bank Group to connect 300 million Africans to electricity by 2030 – had helped shift the conversation on household energy access,
According to her, all 36 National Energy Compacts adopted to date by African countries within the initiative now included 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 AfDB Group committed to channel USD 2 billion over 10 years to clean cooking. Already, the bank had 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. For example, in Uganda, it is supporting the deployment of biogas plants and subsidies that make efficient electric cooking appliances more affordable, in Tanzania its electric cooking devices are being integrated into wider electrification investments, while in Rwanda, the bank’s results-based financing is designed to expand access to clean cooking technologies for 100,000 households and 300 institutions.
In addition, the AfDB 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 UNGA 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.
In her concluding remarks, Akin-Olugbade clarified: “Success will not be measured by the dollars we invest, but by the lives we improve. Clean cooking must become a central pillar of Africa’s energy transition — one that demands political leadership, sustained financing and collective action at scale.”
