Sub-Saharan Africa will miss the UN’s 2030 goal to provide clean cooking for all at today’s pace, with universal access now more realistic by 2040 due to large gaps in financing and infrastructure as well as rapid population growth, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has said.
In a progress report released last Friday, the Paris-based body said the number of Africans without access to clean cooking on the continent has continued to grow, reaching around 1 billion people and affecting four in every five households.
IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a statement that lack of clean cooking “remains one of the great injustices in the world”.
Based on current policies and trends, Daniel Wetzel, head of the IEA’s unit to track sustainable transitions, estimated that “hundreds of millions will still lack access to clean cooking by 2030”. He told Climate Home in emailed comments that only three unspecified countries in sub-Saharan Africa are now on course to reach clean cooking for all their people by 2050 – 20 years after the original deadline.
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Under the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed by UN member states, countries are supposed to make clean cooking available to everyone by 2030.
Mohamed Adow, founder of Kenya-based think-tank Power Shift Africa, described the IEA’s report as a stark reflection of “a deep political failure – promises made, but barely delivered”.
Providing clean cooking in Africa will require stronger focus and coordinated action from governments, industry and development partners, said Birol, adding that “the problem is solvable with existing technologies, and it would cost less than 0.1% of total energy investment globally”.
In May 2024, at a Paris summit on clean cooking in Africa, governments and companies committed to providing $2.2 billion by 2030 to help the continent move away from polluting cooking fuels like charcoal and firewood – which cause damage to health and ecosystems – to cleaner and more efficient options. So far, $470 million of those promises has been delivered, the IEA said.
These funding pledges, however, only represent a fraction of what is needed to solve the problem. The IEA’s new report found that reaching universal access in Africa will require $37 billion in cumulative investment to 2040, or roughly $2 billion per year.
Grace Pila gathering firewood for cooking in Bodo community , Rivers state, Nigeria, March 26, 2025.(Photo: Climate Home News/Vivian Chime)A new pathway
The share of the population with clean cooking access in sub-Saharan Africa is due to rise from around 23% today to 62% by mid-century on today’s trajectory, the report said, adding that sub-Saharan Africa overall is not on track to achieve universal access to clean cooking even by 2050.
In light of this, the IEA recommended a new pathway to achieving the goal by 2040. In its analysis, it looked at countries that have made remarkable progress over the past two decades – including India,