Africa’s clean-cooking campaign is moving from pledges towards capital deployment, with US$740 million of the US$2.2 billion mobilised at the 2024 Summit on Clean Cooking in Africa now disbursed across projects in 22 African countries, according to tracking by the International Energy Agency.
The figures are giving fresh substance to discussions around energy access during UNGA81 in New York. They also expose the scale of the remaining challenge: roughly one billion people in sub-Saharan Africa still lack access to clean cooking solutions.
The 2024 summit brought governments, development institutions and industry together around what had often been treated as a secondary part of Africa’s energy agenda. The IEA says the US$2.2 billion committed there is intended to be fully disbursed by 2030. By July 2026, more than one-third had been deployed.
An energy problem with consequences far beyond energy
Clean cooking sits at the intersection of energy, health, household economics, gender and the environment. Reliance on traditional biomass exposes households to harmful air pollution, consumes time that can otherwise be used for education and economic activity, and contributes to pressure on forests.
The IEA estimates that traditional biomass cooking is associated globally with millions of premature deaths each year, with women and children disproportionately affected. In sub-Saharan Africa, the number of people without clean cooking access has continued to rise even as other regions have made substantial progress.
That makes the financing question particularly urgent. The technology is not the principal constraint. Solutions already range from LPG and biogas to electric cooking and other modern fuels. The challenge is building supply chains, infrastructure, financing and affordability models that can reach households at continental scale.
$740 million deployed, but a much larger market remains
The distinction between commitments and deployment is important. The US$2.2 billion announced in 2024 represented pledged public and private financing. The US$740 million tracked by the IEA represents the portion that had actually been disbursed across 22 African countries.
Additional momentum has followed. The IEA reported in July that a further US$900 million in new commitments had been announced ahead of a second major summit, while policy changes were also accelerating across countries with large access gaps.
According to the IEA, 121 new clean-cooking policies had been introduced across more than 30 countries representing about 80% of Africans without access. That combination of policy reform and capital deployment is significant because financing alone cannot create viable markets where standards, pricing, taxation and energy policies work against adoption.
Clean cooking joins the wider energy-investment architecture
One of the most important changes is that clean cooking is increasingly being treated as part of mainstream energy planning rather than a stand-alone social programme. That creates opportunities to connect it with broader investments in electricity access, distributed renewable energy, fuels, logistics and consumer finance.
The shift also matters for Mission 300, the World Bank and African Development Bank-backed effort to connect 300 million Africans to electricity by 2030. Expanding electricity connections without addressing how households cook would leave a major component of the continent’s energy-access challenge unresolved.
The next test is scale
The progress since 2024 is measurable, but the access gap remains enormous. Financing must ultimately translate into affordable appliances and fuels, dependable supply chains and sustained household use. A stove distributed without an affordable source of energy does not solve the underlying problem.
The IEA estimates that closing the global clean-cooking gap could require around US$4 billion of investment annually. Against that scale, the African commitments are meaningful but must continue moving from announcements into operating businesses, infrastructure and household access.
UNGA81 gives governments and financiers another platform to demonstrate that clean cooking is no longer a peripheral development issue. The more consequential story will be whether the capital already committed can build sustainable markets capable of reaching the hundreds of millions of African households that remain outside the modern energy economy.
Sources
- International Energy Agency: Clean Cooking in Africa 2026
- IEA: New commitments and deployment update
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