Clean Cooking Delivery in Africa Takes Center Stage at UNGA

International leaders gathered at the United Nations General Assembly this week to take stock of how clean cooking commitments are actually being delivered across Africa, and to build momentum toward the second Summit on Clean Cooking in Africa, to be hosted in Nairobi on 27 and 28 January 2027.

The event, convened by the governments of Kenya and Norway, was the first high-level session on clean cooking ever held at the UN General Assembly. It was organised with the International Energy Agency and the Clean Cooking Alliance, in cooperation with UN Energy, and was opened and moderated by IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol. Keynote addresses came from President William Ruto of Kenya and Norway’s Minister of International Development Åsmund Aukrust, participating on behalf of Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre.

For the implementers and operators in the room, the central question was execution. The 2024 Summit on Clean Cooking in Africa, hosted in Paris by the IEA and partners, mobilised more than $2.2 billion in new financial commitments from delegations representing 60 countries. Since then, the IEA has tracked delivery against those pledges, and the results show both progress and unfinished work. More than a third of the pledged funding has been deployed in concrete projects across 28 African countries, and more than 120 new clean cooking policies have been introduced. The pace of people gaining access to clean cooking in Africa is now 30% higher than the average of the past five years, despite headwinds from disruptions to energy flows through the Strait of Hormuz.

Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre pointed to the state of disbursement as a measure of credibility. “More than $700 million of the $2.2 billion pledge has been disbursed,” he said, noting that nearly four in five households in Sub-Saharan Africa still lack access to clean cooking, with women bearing the greatest burden. “Access to clean cooking has become a national development priority, and several countries in Africa are reporting rapid progress. Let us seize on this momentum to support investments at scale.”

President Ruto framed the delivery challenge in direct terms. “Africa has the solutions and the political will to achieve universal access to clean cooking. What we need now is investment and delivery at the scale of our ambition,” he said, committing Kenya to working with African governments and international partners to turn commitments into investment, and investment into implementation.

Birol, whose agency has worked on clean cooking access for more than two decades, described the issue as one of the most important global energy and development challenges, affecting close to 2 billion people worldwide, around half of them in Africa. He said the IEA is now focused on mobilising new commitments for the Nairobi Summit in January, with $900 million already pledged and partners working to build on that figure. The reference material for this gathering, including the full IEA announcement, is available at https://www.iea.org/news/international-leaders-rally-behind-action-on-clean-cooking-access-in-africa-ahead-of-2027-nairobi-summit.

The scale of the operational task remains large. Nearly 2 billion people still lack access to clean cooking globally, contributing to an estimated 2.5 million premature deaths each year from household air pollution. Women and girls, who often spend hours collecting fuel and tending traditional stoves, lose time that would otherwise go to education, employment and economic empowerment. The environmental burden is also substantial: emissions and deforestation linked to traditional cooking practices account for 1.2 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions annually, comparable to those from international aviation and shipping combined.

Meanwhile, the session drew speakers from across the delivery chain, including US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, World Bank President Ajay Banga and UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed. Closing remarks were delivered by Dymphna van der Lans, CEO of the Clean Cooking Alliance, a multilateral initiative now hosted by the IEA.

The Nairobi Summit will be co-chaired by Kenya, Norway, the United States and the IEA, with support from the African Union and the African Development Bank Group. Governments and institutions have been invited to participate and to match ambition with financing and delivery. As of July, the co-chairs had secured an additional $900 million in new financial commitments for clean cooking solutions across the continent, with further commitments expected ahead of the January meeting. Speakers also noted that clean cooking has become a fixture of the wider international agenda, featuring prominently under the last three COP and G20 Presidencies and increasingly reflected in countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions and Energy Compacts under Mission 300.

Whether the remaining gap between pledge and disbursement closes before Nairobi convenes in January 2027 will be the measure of the next fifteen months.