Globally, access to clean cooking remains bleak as over 3 billion people still rely on pollut ing fuels and technologies for cooking, heating and lighting. Since the adoption of clean cooking does not seem to keep up with population growth rates, the world is not seeing the level of growth in uptake that is required (World Health Organization et al., 2018). Though there is appreciable progress in China and India, with over 450 million people gaining access to clean cooking since 2010 through the interplay of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) programmes and clean air policies (International Energy Agency [IEA], 2019), the countries of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), broadly speaking, are still lagging behind.
In developing Asia, 43% of the population relies on biomass for cooking while 80% of the population in SSA still cooks with solid biomass (IEA, 2017). The International Energy Agency (2017) estimates that, under current policy and population trends, 2.3 billion peo ple globally and 60% of the rural population in developing countries will remain without access to clean cooking facilities in 2030. In SSA, over 300 million people will gain access to clean cooking by 2030, an estimated 100 million of them from clean-cooking pledges in countries’ Nationally
Determined Contributions (NDCs) to climate actions under the Paris Agreement. The 2019 African Energy Outlook reports that SSA only had a marginal increase in clean-cooking-technology access – from 15% in 2015 to 17% in 2018 – leaving over 900 million people without access to clean cooking. However, a number of countries in the region are beginning to step up efforts. In Ghana, 24% of the population relied on LPG in 2018, while in Côte d’Ivoire, LPG is now used by almost 55% of urban households.
