Closing the Clean Cooking Gap
Ethiopia has made real strides in expanding electricity access, backed by sustained government investment and ambitious national programmes. Building on that progress, the country is now working to reach the communities still living without access while closing a wider gap in clean cooking.
Only around one in ten Ethiopians have access to clean cooking solutions, with most still relying on firewood and charcoal. Household air pollution from traditional cooking is linked to some 63,000 deaths a year and the average household spends close to 800 hours collecting fuel. Ethiopia now aims to widen access to clean cooking to more than half its population by 2030.
Closing this gap is now a national priority and one of Ethiopia’s most pressing energy challenges. SEforALL works as a technical partner to its Government, supporting the Ministry of Water and Energy to plan and deliver a clean cooking transition built on solid evidence.
As a Mission 300 country, Ethiopia has endorsed a National Energy Compact setting out its commitment to universal, affordable and sustainable energy access
Our Projects
Ethiopia’s clean cooking transition is estimated to cost around $3.4 billion. We are working closely with RVO to build the evidence and local expertise to guide that investment. The work has four parts:
• A clean cooking landscape analysis, mapping current access, gaps, technologies and the roles of the many actors in the sector
• A cost-benefit analysis of the transition, valuing the health, environmental, gender and economic gains against the costs of moving away from traditional fuels
• A geospatial clean cooking plan, identifying which solutions suit which areas, based on local fuel availability, barriers and demand
• Capacity building, training government and sectoral staff to use, maintain and update the planning tools and data themselves
Why is our work with Ethiopia important?
Clean cooking is too often addressed separately from the wider energy transition. In Ethiopia, we help integrate the two, equipping the Government with the data, tools and technical capacity to direct limited resources where they will have the greatest impact. By strengthening this capacity within national institutions, we help ensure that progress is sustained well beyond the life of the project.
