Clean cooking in the climate policy record: evidence from twenty priority countries

SEforALL conducted a systematic search exclusively within CPR’s database for clean cooking content, executing eight standard cooking queries plus supplementary searches for named programmes, hyphenated variants, and local-language terms. The strongest reference found for each country was then classified against a five-tier hierarchy, ranging from Tier 1 (a standalone clean cooking law, regulation, or strategy) to Tier 5 (a passing mention). ⁽¹⁾

To test the robustness of these findings, every classification was re-verified through a second-layer review applied to the same database. This produced refinements to five primary citations and one tier reclassification, leaving the broader findings substantially intact.

What emerged was a policy landscape that is markedly thinner than the international consensus would suggest, and a trajectory across successive Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) that is, on cooking, moving in the wrong direction. The resulting tier landscape, based on what is currently indexed and retrievable in CPR, reveals a policy architecture out of step with the global commitment to clean cooking. 

(1) Tier 1 for standalone clean cooking laws or strategies; Tier 2 for quantified commitments inside NDC submissions or comparable national plans; Tier 3 for qualitative cooking content within broader national policies; Tier 4 for reporting documents describing existing programmes; Tier 5 for passing mentions.

This picture reflects what is currently indexed and traceable in the database. What is and isn’t indexed is itself part of the picture, and includes both recently adopted instruments not yet captured and dedicated instruments still in development, such as Mozambique’s National Clean Cooking Strategy and Investment Plan.

What we found

A trajectory moving in the wrong direction.

The tier landscape above prompts a natural follow-up question on the direction of travel: is the policy landscape getting better or worse? The Paris Agreement was designed around a ratchet mechanism. Each country submits a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) every five years, and each NDC is expected to be more ambitious than the last. The principle is escalating commitment — successive submissions should reflect rising domestic ambition as renewable technology costs fall, evidence accumulates, and the urgency of the climate crisis grows. For clean cooking, the ratchet is not running as designed in the indexed record.

Across the priority country set, seven countries have dropped or diluted quantified cooking commitments between earlier and later NDCs: Ghana, Pakistan, Nigeria, Indonesia, Mozambique, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and Ethiopia, whose update softened earlier commitments. Five have strengthened their cooking content over the same period: China, Mali, Madagascar, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.⁽²⁾ Three carry no cooking content in any indexed NDC submission to date: India, Afghanistan, and the Philippines. The remaining five - Bangladesh, Tanzania, Kenya, Myanmar, and Niger - maintain references at roughly constant intensity, without escalating ambition.

The pattern of withdrawal appears in countries that previously carried quantified commitments. Ghana’s original 2016 NDC committed to scaling LPG access in peri-urban and rural households from 5.5% to 50%, alongside 2 million efficient cookstoves; its later submission and most recent NDC 3.0 drop these targets entirely. Pakistan’s 2019 SE4ALL National Action Plan included a target for improved cookstoves reaching around 40% of the population; this quantification does not appear in the country’s 2025 NDC 3.0. Indonesia, Mozambique, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea show similar trajectories. On the evidence of these submissions, the Paris Agreement’s progression principle is delivering the reverse of what it was designed to produce on clean cooking: not escalating ambition, but quiet retreat.

The substantive instruments that aren’t yet visible in the CPR database

The trajectory across NDCs is one part of the picture; the other is what doesn’t appear in the formal record at all. When SEforALL searched the CPR database for each priority country’s strongest clean cooking reference, several substantive sectoral instruments turned up only as passing mentions inside other documents referenced by name, but not separately indexed and therefore not retrievable through the database’s search interface. These are not aspirational or proposed documents; they are adopted national instruments that carry the operational architecture for delivering clean cooking on the ground.

Across six priority countries, seven such instruments are missing from the indexed record. They include national energy strategies, biomass and wood energy strategies, and standalone clean cooking policies. These are the documents that name implementing agencies, allocate budgets, specify timelines, and translate political commitment into administrative reality.

⁽²⁾ The term "strengthening" denotes an increase in the ambition of the documented commitment across successive NDC submissions; it is not a measure of implementation or of access outcomes. Stated ambition may rise independently of, and is not evidence of, progress on the ground. The trajectory reported here should therefore be understood as an indicator of policy intent within the indexed record.

Nigeria’s National Clean Cooking Policy, adopted in 2024, is the starkest case. The policy targets universal access to clean cooking energy by 2030 - reaching the 30 million Nigerian households that currently cook with firewood and other solid fuels - and sets out a fuel-mix pathway through LPG, biofuels, efficient biomass stoves, electricity, and biogas. Yet the policy document itself is not separately indexed in the CPR database. Nigeria carries the single largest deficit in the priority dataset, 169 million people, and the formal record obscures the country’s most direct policy response to that deficit. Mozambique’s May 2025 Just Energy Transition Strategy, which commits to universal clean cooking access by 2030, sits in the same gap, as does its 2012 Biomass Energy Strategy that provides the climate framing for the LPG Massification target. Madagascar’s Wood Energy Supply Strategy, which carries a 1,000 Gg CO2 by 2030 abatement target referenced in the country’s NDC, is also absent. Ethiopia’s National Clean Cooking Roadmap and Clean Cooking Energy Sector Investment Plan (2025), a costed, phased strategy targeting universal access by 2035 with over USD 3 billion in modelled investment, are likewise missing from the indexed record despite having been adopted before this analysis was conducted. Niger and Mali show similar patterns with their respective national renewable energy strategies.

For analysts and decision-makers, the implication is that drawing conclusions about a country’s policy architecture from CPR alone may produce a systematically incomplete picture of these six countries, and possibly others, where instruments exist but were not retrievable through systematic search. The gap is not in the policy itself, but between the policy work that exists and what the searchable record currently captures.

What this means

These findings reflect the policy commitments that are visible, retrievable, and indexed in the Climate Policy Radar database. The analysis cannot rule out the possibility that strong clean cooking strategies exist in countries beyond those identified here; only that, on the standard cooking searches across the priority country set, they did not surface. The picture this builds is therefore partial.

The NDC 3.0 cycle is the vehicle through which countries can either restore the quantified cooking commitments that earlier submissions diluted, or allow the trajectory of retreat to continue. For the seven priority countries whose later NDCs dropped or diluted explicit clean cooking targets, including the largest deficit countries in the dataset, restoration is both possible and consequential. Among the priority country submissions, one stands out as a positive template: Bangladesh’s National Action Plan for Clean Cooking (2020-2030), led by the Sustainable and Renewable Energy Development Authority (SREDA), puts the cost of reaching 100% clean cooking access at USD 2.9 billion over the decade and assigns delivery year by year across LPG, electric cooking, biomass, biogas, and other fuels. It offers a model for what a comprehensive standalone clean cooking strategy looks like. Bangladesh’s plan is indexed in CPR; Ethiopia’s National Clean Cooking Roadmap and its companion Clean Cooking Energy Sector Investment Plan (2025), comparable in scope and larger in financing at over USD 3 billion, are not. Ethiopia’s case illustrates one of the patterns this analysis has surfaced: substantive, recently adopted instruments take time to enter indexing platforms, and a complete view of national clean cooking policy frameworks often requires looking beyond any single database at a given moment.

The climate policy record itself needs to become a more accurate reflection of the policy work that exists. For the six countries identified here, accounting for 399 million people without clean cooking access, the substantive instruments that drive implementation on the ground are not searchable in the CPR database. Closing that visibility gap is partly the work of governments, who submit their instruments to indexing platforms; partly the work of databases like CPR, which continue to expand their coverage; and partly the work of methodology, which should not treat retrievability as a proxy for existence.

For clean cooking advocates, researchers, and the wider implementing community, the methodological lesson is direct. Searching a single climate policy database, even a thorough one, can leave significant policy work invisible. The strongest analyses combine database-based search with country-level engagement: conversations with national ministries, sectoral organisations, and in-country implementing partners that surface instruments not yet captured in any searchable record.

Closing the gap between current policy and the 2030 universal access commitment will require both ambition and visibility. The policy machinery that exists in many countries needs to do more, and the systems used to track that work need to see more of what already exists. 

What SEforALL sees on the clean cooking policy landscape

The CPR database indexes formal climate policy documents, including laws, strategies, plans, NDCs, and related instruments that pass through its search-and-classification interface. That scope is the right frame for an analysis asking how deeply clean cooking has been embedded in national climate policy, which is the question this analysis set out to answer. It is not a complete inventory of clean cooking activity in the priority countries. Sovereign commitments made through joint international initiatives, country-level integrated planning products, results-based financing facilities, and sector-specific implementation programmes all sit alongside the climate policy documents the database captures. These sit largely outside what CPR is designed to index, and their absence from the analysis is a matter of scope rather than of gap. SEforALL's own work across the priority countries provides a partial view of what that wider layer contains.

Among these is Mission 300, a joint initiative of the World Bank and the African Development Bank, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, and SEforALL. Mission 300 aims to connect 300 million people across Africa to electricity by 2030. Under the initiative, 36 African governments have developed and launched National Energy Compacts, most carrying explicit clean cooking targets alongside electrification. Mozambique's Compact commits to raising clean cooking access from 17% to 54% by 2030; Kenya's targets universal clean cooking access by the same date. The Compacts are sovereign documents with defined targets, timelines, and delivery pathways, and are not searchable in CPR at the time of this analysis.

Beyond the Compacts, SEforALL supports country-level integrated planning work with national governments. Integrated Energy Plans, developed by SEforALL in collaboration with national ministries and funding partners, model fuel-by-fuel pathways for clean cooking access, quantify the investment required to meet national targets, and identify the technology mixes best suited to a country's electrification trajectory. These are analytical instruments rather than policy documents; they can inform the design of national strategies.

Alongside the policy and planning layer, SEforALL's clean cooking programme extends into complementary areas: results-based financing through the Universal Energy Facility, implementation partnerships such as the joint work with the World Food Programme deploying electric cooking in Tanzanian schools, sector-specific work for cooking in schools and healthcare facilities, and analytical outputs including the Energizing Finance series, which tracks financial commitments to electrification and clean cooking in the twenty largest energy access deficit countries.

The searchable climate policy record covers one part of the clean cooking policy landscape. Sovereign commitments, integrated planning products, financing facilities, and implementation programmes sit alongside it, and together with the indexed record make up the broader set of activities shaping national clean cooking outcomes.

EDITOR'S NOTE: SEforALL is supporting Climate Policy Radar in its efforts to understand and communicate the real-world value of its database. CPR's AI-supported indexing makes climate policy documents searchable at scale, enabling structured cross-country analyses. The analysis below was undertaken in that context, and the findings are contributing to the database's continued evolution.