Progress on clean cooking requires efforts from a wide range of stakeholders. These include efforts to enhance countries’ policy frameworks, address consumer affordability and other barriers to adoption,  cultivate a skilled workforce and mobilise additional financing to the sector – themes discussed in this chapter.

Access to low-cost debt will be key for companies to grow their customer base quickly. In the ACCESS, the share of debt financing in the sector increases from 35% today to over 50%. This depends on more financiers being able to assess and appropriately price risk clean cooking companies and investments. Technical assistance and concessional finance can help, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises that play an important role expanding clean cooking where commercial players will not.

At current prices, the cost of gaining clean cooking access would exceed 10% of household monthly income for nearly 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa. Affordability varies significantly by fuel type, but financial incentives and business models that allow consumers to make purchases in small increments play an important role across all market segments. Some measures include value added tax (VAT) and import tariff exemptions for clean cooking stoves, fuels and equipment, pricing regulations, targeted affordability support for the lowest-income households, and using clean cooking carbon credit revenue to offer solutions at lower prices.

Access is not guaranteed by affordability alone, as non-financial barriers play a key role in the adoption of clean cooking technologies. Factors like stove design, cooking speed, safety, ability to prepare traditional meals, and fuel availability all affect the uptake and enduring use of clean cooking methods. The success of clean cooking campaigns depends on building awareness, providing training, incorporating cultural traditions into programme design, and strong community-level engagement.

Policy efforts play the central role in co-ordination between industry and government, international and grassroots efforts. Many measures that require little to no fiscal outlay can significantly reduce operation risks for clean cooking companies, including implementing and enforcing standards and regulations for fuels and equipment, facilitating infrastructure development, improving local data and tracking, and increasing awareness of clean cooking initiatives and their benefits. 

Scaling up Africa’s clean cooking supply chains can help reduce delivery costs and support local development. The operation of clean cooking supply chains in Africa will require 460 000 additional workers by 2040 in the ACCESS. Most of these roles require fewer than four weeks of vocational training, with clean cooking companies playing a big role in training new workers.