Business
Groups promote modern cooking – The Nation Newspaper
The Rockefeller Foundation, Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet Inc. (Global Energy Alliance), The Clean Cooking Alliance, and Energy Corps, yesterday, launched the ‘Clean Cooking Accelerator Initiative’ designed to expand access to modern cooking technologies in Africa.
The Initiative was announced at the High-Level Dialogue on Advancing Energy Access and Cooking Solutions during the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) 2026 Ministerial.
The dialogue highlighted progress since the 2024 Summit on Clean Cooking in Africa, approaches that have accelerated impact, and provided a platform for participants to announce new initiatives to advance energy access.
The 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, is in the lead up to the second Summit on Clean Cooking in Africa, to be held in Nairobi from July 9-10, 2026 and co-chaired by Kenya, Norway, the United States and the IEA.
Drawing on over two decades of leadership in global energy-access tracking, the IEA highlighted its analytical leadership and convening power to elevate clean cooking on the global agenda and to support consistent tracking of outcomes across initiatives, including the new Clean Cooking Accelerator Initiative.
This Initiative, according to a statement, reflects the partnering 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 one billion people in Africa rely on traditional fuels such as wood and charcoal, contributing to household air pollution that the World Health Organisation (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.
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 – with support from The Rockefeller Foundation, Global Energy Alliance, Sustainable Energy for All, and others – to provide 300 million Africans with electricity by 2030.
Starting in approximately half a dozen countries (to be announced in the coming months), 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 Clean Cooking Accelerator Initiative seeks to get cleaner cooking methods to more people by coordinating technical expertise, catalytic capital, and implementation support.
While each participating organisation is already pursuing efforts to advance clean cooking, the Initiative will bring the organisations together around certain efforts and allow for information sharing to maximize 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.
This includes, but not limited to the following: Clean Cooking Fellows, Capacity Building and busting through bottlenecks; and Mission 300 national energy compacts
In select markets, The Rockefeller Foundation (through its Mission 300 Accelerator housed within RF Catalytic Capital, its charitable spin-off) and Energy Corps are providing support to CoAction Global to develop a cohort of Clean Cooking Fellows to strengthen institutional capacity and develop investable project pipelines.
CoAction Global, an independent non-profit impact accelerator facilitating innovation and investment in especially hard-to-reach places, manages the Mission 300 Fellowship program.
“The Rockefeller Foundation and its Mission 300 Accelerator are thrilled to be working with these organisations to take on an incredible development opportunity: expanding access to clean, modern cooking methods.
“There are smart, easy solutions that can prevent hundreds of thousands of people needlessly dying from indoor air pollution each year, and we are excited to try to drive investment into solving this problem,” CEO of the Mission 300 Accelerator, RF Catalytic Capital, Inc., Andrew Herscowitz, said.
Building capacity to deliver clean cooking solutions at scale, the Clean Cooking Fellows will receive structured training, analytical tools, and ongoing technical support from the Clean Cooking Alliance, which will serve as a lead technical delivery partner supporting country-level capacity building.
CEO of the Clean Cooking Alliance, Dymphna van der Lans, said: “We’re seeing real momentum behind clean cooking across Africa, but momentum alone doesn’t deliver solutions to households, schools and institutions.
“What matters now is building the capacity, partnerships, and market foundations that allow countries to move from targets to implementation. This collaboration is an important step in making that shift possible.”
As a non-profit working to end energy poverty by connecting local leadership with global energy expertise, philanthropy, and NGO organisation, Energy Corps will channel philanthropic capital to mobilize private-sector investment and industrial capacity.
This support will strengthen capacity building and investment in bankable projects to address supply-chain and infrastructure bottlenecks.
“Clean cooking is a fast way to deliver dignity, health, and economic opportunity—at massive scale. This Initiative is built to turn commitment into real projects, real infrastructure, and real access by mobilizing more capital,” CEO and Founder of Energy Corps, Toby Rice, said.
Complementing these efforts, the Mission 300 Accelerator is also collaborating with the Global Energy Alliance to advance clean cooking through Mission 300 National Energy Compacts.
Together, they will deploy catalytic capital and targeted technical assistance to strengthen in-country delivery capacity through specialized Compact Delivery and Monitoring Units (CDMUs), including dedicated personnel to support implementation of clean cooking priorities and expand access for vulnerable communities.
“The Global Energy Alliance has seen firsthand how electric cooking can transform lives, already reaching over 26,000 people in Kenya and Uganda through our Productive Use Financing Facility (PUFF),” said Woochong Um, CEO of the Global Energy Alliance.
The CEO added: “As a founding member of the Global Electric Cooking Coalition, we are committed to scaling these solutions continent-wide, coordinating with governments to support CDMUs that provide critical, long-term planning and delivery capacity.
“The Clean Cooking Accelerator Initiative supercharges this momentum, aligning with Mission 300 to build resilient energy systems and empower communities through local, expert-led implementation.”
The Clean Cooking Accelerator Initiative will also be outcome-oriented, focused on measurable improvements in country readiness, market conditions, and the development of robust, investment-ready pipelines.
Progress will be measured by tangible movement across two fronts namely, achievement of key market-enabling milestones that unlock private investment, and advancement of concrete, bankable projects.
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