Briefing Report Energy Access Practice · No. 01
Health, equity, climate, and the economics of ending reliance on polluting cooking fuels.
Executive Summary
Roughly 2.1 billion people — about one in four — still cook over open fires and polluting stoves fuelled by wood, charcoal, dung, coal, or kerosene. The resulting household air pollution is the world's leading environmental health risk after ambient air pollution, killing an estimated 3.2 million people a year.
This report argues that clean cooking is uniquely cost-effective: the technologies exist, and the benefits compound across health, gender equity, climate, and economic productivity. The binding constraint is not knowledge but financing and delivery. Reaching universal access by 2030 — SDG 7.1.2 — requires roughly tripling annual investment to about $8 billion, concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa.
It also draws a distinction too often blurred: not all alternatives are equally clean. Open-fire and solid-fuel cooking is acutely hazardous, but even gas stoves carry measurable indoor-air and combustion risks. The cleanest destination at the point of use is electric cooking paired with a decarbonising grid.
01 — The Access Gap
Cooking is the most basic energy service, yet it remains the most stubborn frontier of energy access. About 2.1 billion people — concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa and developing Asia — rely on solid fuels and kerosene burned in open fires or rudimentary stoves.1
While electricity access has expanded rapidly, clean cooking has lagged. In Sub-Saharan Africa the absolute number of people without clean cooking has risen, as population growth outpaces new connections. On current trends, the world will miss universal access in 2030 by a wide margin — with the shortfall almost entirely in Africa.
Households rarely switch fuels all at once. Most practise “fuel stacking” — combining a clean fuel for some meals with traditional biomass for others — so headline access figures understate how much dirty combustion still occurs in the home.
Where the access gap sits
Share of population without access to clean cooking, by region
02 — The Case for Action
Few development interventions pay off across as many dimensions at once. Clean cooking is unusual in that the health, time, climate, and economic dividends compound rather than compete.
Smoke from solid-fuel cooking drives 3.2 million premature deaths a year — from pneumonia, stroke, heart disease, COPD and lung cancer — more than malaria and tuberculosis combined. Women and young children, who spend the most time near the hearth, bear the heaviest burden.
Gathering fuel and tending slow fires can consume several hours a day, time that falls disproportionately on women and girls and crowds out schooling, paid work, and rest. Fuel collection also exposes them to physical risk. Clean cooking is, in effect, time-poverty reduction.
Residential biomass burning is a leading source of black carbon — a short-lived climate pollutant — and, where wood and charcoal are harvested unsustainably, a driver of forest degradation. Cutting these emissions delivers near-term climate benefit.
The IEA puts the combined annual cost of inaction — health systems, lost productive time, and climate damage — at roughly $2.4 trillion.2 Against an $8 billion-a-year investment need, the implied return is extraordinary, even before counting avoided deforestation and energy-security gains.
“Access to clean cooking is one of the great inequities of our time — and one of the most cost-effective ways to improve health, advance gender equality, and protect the climate at the same time.”
— Framing widely echoed by the IEA, WHO and the World Bank03 — Hazards at the Hearth
The case for clean cooking rests on a physical reality: combustion inside the home releases pollutants exactly where people breathe. The hazards differ sharply by fuel and stove — and, importantly, even gas is not benign.
A three-stone fire or basic biomass stove releases a dense mix of fine particulate matter (PM2.5), carbon monoxide, black carbon, and carcinogens such as benzene, formaldehyde and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. During cooking, kitchen PM2.5 can exceed the WHO 24-hour guideline of 15 µg/m³ by one to two orders of magnitude.3
The harms are not only respiratory. Open flames and unstable pots cause severe burns and scalds, especially among children. Kerosene adds the further risks of accidental poisoning, fires, and explosions. Carbon-monoxide build-up in unventilated kitchens can be fatal.
Switching to LPG or natural gas sharply reduces particulate exposure — which is why gas is a legitimate rung on the ladder. But gas combustion still emits nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), carbon monoxide, fine particulates and formaldehyde, and gas lines and appliances can leak benzene and methane even when off.4
In poorly ventilated kitchens, gas cooking can push indoor NO₂ above health guidelines, and research in high-income settings has associated gas-stove use with a meaningful share of childhood asthma. The practical implications: ventilation matters, and the cleanest option at the point of use is electric cooking — which moves combustion out of the home entirely.
A gradient of exposure
Illustrative relative indoor air pollution & hazard, by cooking method
| Method | Indoor PM / pollutants | Other hazards |
|---|---|---|
| Open / three-stone fire | Extreme | Burns, CO, eye damage |
| Charcoal & kerosene | High | CO, fire, poisoning |
| Improved biomass stove | High–moderate | Reduced but present |
| LPG / gas | Moderate | NO₂, leaks, burns |
| Electric / induction | Minimal* | Negligible at point of use |
The difference a full transition makes. Moving a household from an open fire to truly clean cooking — electric, or well-ventilated clean fuel — can cut kitchen fine-particulate concentrations by more than 90%. Scaled to universal access, that is the pathway to averting the bulk of the 3.2 million annual deaths, alongside fewer burns, less carbon-monoxide poisoning, and hours of reclaimed time each day.
04 — Technology Pathways
There is no single solution. The right technology depends on local fuel costs, grid reliability, supply chains, and household incomes. Successful transitions move households progressively up an “energy ladder” toward cleaner, more efficient fuels — while displacing, not merely supplementing, traditional biomass.
The workhorse of recent transitions. Clean-burning relative to biomass, fast, and widely accepted; scaling it depends on distribution networks, cylinder financing, and affordability against volatile fuel prices. A fossil fuel, but a major step-change.
Induction stoves, efficient hotplates and electric pressure cookers — increasingly viable as grids expand and solar/battery costs fall. The cleanest option at the point of use and the likely long-run destination, especially paired with renewables.
Household or community biodigesters convert organic waste to cooking gas; ethanol stoves use clean liquid fuel from local feedstocks. Strong fit for rural and agricultural settings, with co-benefits for waste and fertiliser.
Higher-efficiency and gasifier stoves and processed fuels (pellets, briquettes) cut fuel use and some emissions. Best understood as a transitional bridge: they reduce harm but do not eliminate household air pollution.
A caution on shortcuts. Recent analyses found that some improved-cookstove carbon-credit projects over-credited their climate benefit by a large multiple.5 The lesson is not that clean cooking lacks value — it is that credible measurement and verification matter, and that durable fuel-switching beats marginal efficiency gains.
05 — Economics & Financing
The technologies exist and the cost-benefit case is overwhelming. The binding constraint is capital and its structure: high upfront costs for stoves and connections, thin consumer credit, fuel-price affordability, and business models that struggle to reach low-income, dispersed households.
Reaching universal access by 2030 requires on the order of $8 billion per year, with roughly half needed in Sub-Saharan Africa. Today's spending is a fraction of that. At a 2024 summit, donors and industry pledged around $2.2 billion toward African clean cooking — a signal of momentum, but still short of the run-rate required.6
Carbon finance has become a significant funding channel: clean cooking is one of the largest categories of carbon credits issued. It can crowd in private capital — but only with rigorous measurement, conservative baselines, and transparent verification, or it risks both under-delivering on climate and undermining trust.
The financing shortfall
Annual clean-cooking investment, indicative ($ billion)
06 — Barriers
The obstacles are rarely about whether a technology works. They are about affordability, reliability, behaviour, and the institutions that connect supply to demand.
Stoves, cylinders and connections require cash that low-income households lack, while traditional biomass is often free to collect — making the clean option look expensive at the point of decision.
Even after adoption, volatile LPG prices or unreliable electricity push households back down the ladder to biomass — the “stacking” that erodes health gains.
Reaching dispersed rural populations with fuel refills, maintenance, and after-sales service is operationally hard and capital-intensive.
Clean-cooking enterprises face high customer-acquisition costs and long payback, deterring commercial lenders without concessional or blended capital.
Cooking is cultural. Taste, meal types, cookware, and habit shape adoption; technologies that ignore how people actually cook are abandoned.
Where clean cooking lacks a political champion, a dedicated budget line, or reliable measurement, it competes poorly against more visible infrastructure.
07 — Outlook & Policy Levers
Progress is possible — several countries have moved tens of millions of households up the ladder within a decade. The levers are well understood; the question is sustained execution and finance.
Smart, time-limited subsidies and pay-as-you-go models lower the upfront barrier while building markets that can eventually stand on their own.
Concessional and results-based finance — including high-integrity carbon credits — de-risks private investment in distribution and supply chains.
As grids and solar mini-grids expand, e-cooking becomes the default destination — aligning the cooking transition with the broader clean-energy build-out.
The SDG 7 target is reachable in principle. Meeting it requires roughly tripling investment and sustaining it — above all in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Figures are drawn from the leading institutional trackers and rounded for clarity. They indicate magnitude; consult the primary sources for precise, year-specific data. This report is informational and does not constitute investment advice.