Perspective: Why national averages slow the clean cooking transition

Despite decades of investment in clean cooking technologies, ambitious national strategies, and growing climate finance commitments, nearly two billion people still cook with polluting fuels. Governments are accelerating efforts to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 7 while increasingly recognising clean cooking as essential to climate action, public health, gender equality, and economic development.

Yet, progress remains stubbornly slow. The challenge now is to ensure investment reaches the right places and responds to how communities actually cook and use energy.

For too long, clean cooking programmes have been guided by national averages that mask the complexity of local realities. A country may report rising electrification rates, growing liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) use, or increasing investment in modern energy. Yet these figures reveal little about how people actually cook or the fuels they combine. They also tell us little about the infrastructure available in homes or the financial decisions people make every day.

Well-intentioned programmes can therefore promote the right technologies in the wrong places. Whether cleaner cooking solutions are adopted and sustained depends on factors including income, market access, gender roles, cultural preferences, infrastructure, institutional capacity, and public policy. These factors differ between countries and, importantly, within them.

Clean cooking is therefore more than an energy challenge. Relying on broad national statistics alone can result in investments that fail to reflect these differences. The focus needs to shift towards using evidence to identify which solutions are appropriate in different places.

Kenya provides a useful example of this approach. Through the Kenya National Cooking Transition Strategy, the country has committed to achieving universal access to clean cooking by 2030. Translating that ambition into lasting change requires evidence that shows where barriers exist and how they differ across counties.

The Accelerating County Cooking Transitions (A2CT) project is helping to build this evidence. Funded by UK PACT, SNV implements the project with GAMOS East Africa and the Clean Cooking Association of Kenya.

The project conducted one of Kenya's most comprehensive county-level clean cooking baseline assessments. It surveyed more than 2,500 households and assessed over 1,900 institutions, facilities, and businesses across Kakamega, Meru, and Taita Taveta. The findings revealed three distinct county realities, each requiring a different pathway towards cleaner cooking.

Firewood remains the dominant cooking fuel across all three counties, but its use varies considerably.

LPG adoption also varies, ranging from just 12% in Kakamega to 20% in Taita Taveta.

These differences reflect variations in affordability, market access, infrastructure, and local context. They also challenge the assumption that a single policy approach or technology can drive the clean cooking transition everywhere.

Access to energy does not necessarily translate into adoption of cleaner cooking. Electrification statistics, for example, can suggest that households are ready to transition to electric cooking. The baseline paints a more nuanced picture.

In Kakamega, around 60% of households have access to electricity. However, only 27% have electrical sockets located within one metre of the cooking area. Across all three counties, households combine firewood, charcoal, LPG, and electricity depending on cost, cooking needs, and fuel availability.

This shows that the transition is rarely a straightforward switch from one fuel to another. How it happens depends heavily on local circumstances.

The findings also raise wider questions about how clean cooking investments are planned.

First, evidence should inform investment priorities. Country-level statistics can conceal significant differences within countries. Counties operating within the same national policy environment can face very different barriers, including affordability, market access, infrastructure, and consumer behaviour.

Without this understanding, scarce resources may go towards solutions that are technically viable but poorly suited to the local context. As investment in clean cooking grows, the evidence informing those decisions will become increasingly important.

Second, the sector needs to look beyond households. Schools, hospitals, correctional facilities, and catering enterprises consume significant quantities of biomass every day, with both environmental and financial costs.

The A2CT baseline found that learning institutions across the three counties remain overwhelmingly dependent on firewood despite relatively high levels of electricity access. During the assessment of Manyani Prison in Taita Taveta, one officer said its firewood stove had "never been turned off" since 1954. The example illustrates how deeply established traditional cooking systems remain in public institutions.

Supporting institutions to adopt cleaner technologies could deliver environmental and health benefits while creating demand for local clean cooking markets. This will require appropriate financing, procurement, and infrastructure investment.

Third, clean cooking needs to be approached as a people-centred development issue, rather than primarily as a technology programme. Affordability, gender dynamics, disability inclusion, market systems, and livelihood opportunities all influence fuel choices.

Women continue to bear primary responsibility for cooking while often facing greater financial constraints in adopting modern energy solutions. The transition also offers employment opportunities for young people across clean cooking value chains, including distribution, maintenance, fuel supply, and enterprise development.

Persons with disabilities also need to be considered in technology design, financing mechanisms, and programme implementation. Clean cooking policies therefore need to connect with wider objectives for economic inclusion, social protection, and local development.

For policymakers, county-level evidence can strengthen planning and budgeting and help investments respond to local market conditions. Development partners need to invest in technologies alongside the data, market knowledge, and institutional capacity needed to sustain the transition. For the private sector, understanding local demand before introducing products into new markets can reduce uncertainty and improve targeting.

Achieving universal access to clean cooking will require ambitious targets and continued technological innovation. But Kenya's experience demonstrates the importance of understanding what is happening below the national level.

There is no single pathway to cleaner cooking. Better local evidence can help governments, development partners, and investors understand which solutions are likely to work, where, and why. Making that evidence part of investment decisions will be critical to turning national clean cooking ambitions into lasting change.