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.

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, Indonesia and China – and how their specific efforts shaped by national priorities, infrastructure capacities, and geographic conditions have helped them achieve access as high as 80-90%.

Based on national factors – from clean cooking policies to income levels and infrastructure development – the IEA said that if guided by best practices in other developing economies, African countries could make similar progress and achieve universal coverage by 2040.

Working to the 2030 SDG deadline would require 160 million people in Africa to gain access annually until 2030. But with the later 2040 target, that figure would be halved to 80 million annually – which the IEA says is more feasible and comparable to historical rates observed in success stories in Asia.

LPG and carbon credits to drive access

Its report found that since 2018, most of the progress recorded was driven by switching to cookstoves running on liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), accounting for three-quarters of the nearly 80 million people in sub-Saharan Africa who adopted cleaner cooking.

According to the IEA analysis, gas will increasingly play a role through to 2040, providing access for over 60% of newly connected households, while the rest will use growing shares of electricity, bioethanol, biogas and advanced biomass cookstoves.

Direct investments in LPG reached $590 million in 2023 but funding for other clean cooking solutions has lagged. In the same year, investments in non-gas options totalled $83 million – a drop from $192 million recorded in 2020, the IEA said.

Carbon credits have also helped drive access to clean cooking in Africa over the past decade, according to the report, moving the continent’s cookstove market from one heavily reliant on development finance to one increasingly supported by carbon markets.

Campaigners have pushed back against the use of LPG and carbon credits to drive clean cooking access, arguing they are false solutions that risk locking Africa into dirty fuels and perpetuati