Rockefeller Foundation, Others to Scale Modern Cooking Technologies in Africa

Emmanuel Addeh in Abuja

The Rockefeller Foundation, Global Energy Alliance, Clean Cooking Alliance, and Energy Corps yesterday launched the Clean Cooking Accelerator Initiative to expand access to modern cooking technologies in Africa.

This was announced at the High-Level Dialogue on Advancing Energy Access and Cooking Solutions during the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) 2026 Ministerial, chaired by IEA Executive Director Dr. Fatih Birol, Kenya’s Minister of Energy and Petroleum James Opiyo Wandayi, U.S. Secretary of Energy Christopher Wright, and Norway’s Minister of Energy Terje Lien Aasland.

The Initiative, a statement said, reflects the organisations’ renewed commitment to advancing universal access to clean cooking to help improve health, save lives, empower women and children, create local jobs, reduce forest degradation, and build economic opportunity.

Approximately 1 billion people in Africa rely on traditional fuels such as wood and charcoal, contributing to household air pollution that the World Health Organization (WHO) associates with more than 810,000 premature deaths annually.

These fuels and appliances significantly increase household air pollution for families in Sub-Saharan Africa—especially women and children—and the associated health risks, such as respiratory illnesses. The IEA, which also identified clean cooking as a defining challenge for Africa’s prosperity, estimates that closing the global clean cooking gap requires more than $2 billion per year.

While significant progress has been made in expanding access to clean cooking in parts of the world, this progress has been uneven, the statement said. In Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, population growth has outpaced gains in access, and the gap continues to widen by an estimated 14 million people per year as the number of those without clean cooking solutions increases.

Clean cooking solutions, including electric, biogas, bioethanol, liquid petroleum gas (LPG) and efficient biomass stoves, produce far fewer harmful particles compared to wood or charcoal. Rapidly increasing access to clean cooking is also an integral component of Mission 300, an initiative led by the World Bank and African Development Bank.

The Clean Cooking Accelerator Initiative aims to expand to additional Sub-Saharan African countries that request support and demonstrate readiness and momentum toward universal access in Africa to clean cooking.

The overarching aim is improving health, saving lives, empowering women and children, reducing forest degradation, creating local jobs, and building economic opportunity across the continent.

The initiative seeks to get cleaner cooking methods to more people by coordinating technical expertise, catalytic capital, and implementation support. While each participating organization is already pursuing efforts to advance clean cooking, it will bring the organisations together around certain efforts and allow for information sharing to maximise collective impact.

Working in countries that express interest and demonstrated readiness, the initiative will support efforts to strengthen supply chains and invest in infrastructure to scale modern cooking solutions.