Clean Cooking Forum 2022

Day 0 will host various sessions by the Clean Cooking Alliance and partners before the Clean Cooking Forum 2022 begins on Day 1.

This roundtable discussion, in partnership with the WHO’s Health and Energy Platform of Action, brings together representatives from governments, the private sector, financing institutions, academia and civil society to share insights on the role of renewables-based clean cooking solutions in achieving SDG 7 and actions needed to scale-up investments. Please register here.

Check in and pick up credentials at the Kempinski Hotel Conference Center.

The Innovation Expo will showcase a range of developments from companies and other organizations helping to drive the clean cooking ecosystem forward.

Game-changing innovations can dramatically contribute to scaling the sector and bring us closer to universal access to clean cooking solutions. These talks will feature innovators who will discuss how their products, services, or approaches have the potential to address key challenges in the sector.

1. Advancing innovative direct impact monitoring: Fuel Use Electronic Logger (FUEL): Nordica MacCarty, Associate Professor of Engineering, Oregon State University
2. Clean cooking saves lives: the Air Burden of Disease Explorer can predict how many: Michael Johnson, Technical Director, Berkeley Air Monitoring Group
3. Advancing digital MRV to scale nature-linked clean cooking: Claire Willers, Senior Manager, Market Relations, The Gold Standard Foundation
4. Unlocking climate finance for clean cooking in displacement settings: Muna Eltahir, Director of Practical Action Sudan
5. Applying research to create a new results-based finance tool for women’s empowerment: Subhrendu Pattanayak, Oak Professor of Environmental and Energy Policy, Duke University

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Game-changing innovations can dramatically contribute to scaling the sector and bring us closer to universal access to clean cooking solutions. These talks will feature innovators who will discuss how their products, services, or approaches have the potential to address key challenges in the sector.

1. Multi-Product Innovation for Scale: Peter Scott, Founder & CEO, BURN Manufacturing
2. Formalizing last mile LPG retailers in Nigeria: Jane Ekeh, Co-Founder, Gas 360
3. Building a Clean Cooking Network from the Ground Up: Greg Murray, Co-Founder & CEO, KOKO Networks
4. Spotting biodigester leakages from afar, in real-time: Vijay Bhopal, CEO, Inclusive Energy
5. Using carbon credits to improve clean cooking adoption: Okey Esse, CEO, Powerstove 
6. An Integrated Approach to Household Energy Access: Laurent Van Houcke, Co-Founder & COO, Bboxx

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Game-changing innovations can dramatically contribute to scaling the sector and bring us closer to universal access to clean cooking solutions. These talks will feature innovators who will discuss how their products, services, or approaches have the potential to address key challenges in the sector.

1. What did we learn from ten years of investing in the clean cooking sector?  Andrew Tarazid-Tarawali, Associate Director, Acumen
2. How did we set up a clean cooking focused investment fund?  Xavier Pierluca, Co-Managing Director, Spark+ Fund

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While clean cooking tool and fuel markets remain underdeveloped, predictable results-based payment streams present significant scope for companies to level up their current low returns on investment in clean cooking. By adjusting returns, clean cooking companies can achieve scale and operational viability faster, including by more reliably attracting more traditional forms of commercial capital. However, most companies have little visibility on what new outcome buyers need to deploy their capital, and thus the opportunity remains latent. Similarly, traditional promoters of clean cooking, including donors, generally tend not to know how best to engage with these outcome buyers.  

This session will present insights to help the sector develop the most effective approaches to unlock predictable results-based payment streams from high-value outcome buyers, including buyers in the voluntary carbon markets, buyers of social impact, and buyers in financial and capital markets seeking Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) returns through for example green lending or social impact bonds. 

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The relationship between household air pollution and illnesses like pneumonia and heart disease has been well documented. But emerging evidence suggests that the health impacts of household air pollution reach even further, contributing to negative birth outcomes, poor cognition, mental health disorders, and exacerbating COVID-19. New estimates from the World Health Organization show that exposure to household air pollution was responsible for 3.2 million deaths in 2019.

In this session health and air quality experts from across the globe with interdisciplinary backgrounds will discuss the latest and most critical research on clean cooking and health.  Participants will walk away with knowledge and be able to communicate about the latest research on household air pollution and health. The discussion will identify remaining research gaps at the intersection of clean cooking, air quality, and health, and will spur crossdisciplinarity collaboration to fill them.

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More than half the world’s population lives in cities. Urban areas are engines of economic growth and innovation — but also huge carbon emitters, contributors of pollution and consumers of resources. The way in which cities are designed and governed impacts the quality of life for billions of people. In growing cities around the world, three-quarters of the infrastructure that will exist by 2050 has yet to be built.

Empowering cities to lead clean cooking transitions that best suit the needs of their citizens is essential to improving health, environment, and climate. Municipal energy, climate and development plans should integrate cooking needs and create an enabling environment for the clean cooking sector to provide affordable and accessible solutions.

Cities are at a critical inflection point: Decisions made today will determine whether we continue on a path of fractured, unsafe, polluting growth, or succeed in creating a sustainable, resilient, more inclusive future. This session will discuss how national, state and city governments can collaborate to accelerate access to clean cooking and make cities around the world more resilient, inclusive, low-carbon places that are better for people and the planet.

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Results-based financing (RBF), particularly through the growth of climate finance and carbon credits, was identified as one of the most promising opportunities of the upcoming decade. While exciting progress has been made to advance RBF for clean cooking in recent years, the value of clean cooking must be better articulated, transaction costs reduced, and participating actors supported for the sector to capitalize on this opportunity. Understanding clean cooking company revenues and costs for each unit of production, i.e., unit economics, is essential for RBF program developers as they determine demand and supply side subsidy levels. In turn, well-structured demand and supply side subsidies will enable existing providers to reach operational viability and commercial sustainability quicker. This improves the overall attractiveness of clean cooking markets for commercial investors and financial markets.

This session will present early findings from recent unit economics research and associated tools, focusing on insights into key drivers of company costs and profitability and recommendations on how best to sequence different capital stacks for each context and business model. This will be followed by a panel discussion reflecting on how the study and tool impact the panelists’ own work.

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Women are the driving force behind the clean cooking transition – feeding their families, working in sales, leading enterprises, implementing policy and structuring finance. They spark innovation despite all odds, they persist in the face of obstacles and insist on building a better future for all.

For too long the conversation around gender and clean cooking has focused on women as victims – suffering the disproportionate impacts of poor health and safety – or merely as passive beneficiaries, receiving improved solutions delivered by well-meaning donors. But this historic narrative does not reflect reality.

Accelerating access to clean cooking is a critical tool for empowering women and advancing gender equality. Women are essential to the widespread adoption and use of clean cooking solutions. Their agency as household decision makers and consumers should not be underestimated. Their involvement as employees & entrepreneurs helps businesses thrive. Their leadership in policy and finance is essential to achieving progress at scale.

This session will delve into the stories and experiences of women working across the clean cooking ecosystem – as policy makers, entrepreneurs and investors – discussing the unique issues impacting women and how we can ensure that women have equal opportunities to lead, participate in and benefit from a just and inclusive energy transition.

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The role and influence of youth in climate, energy, and development efforts has grown in recent years. Youth have a vital role in achieving universal access to clean cooking, contributing to the cleaner, healthier, and more sustainable future that young people need to thrive. Ninety percent of the world’s 1.8 billion youth live in developing countries where 2.4 billion people still rely on polluting fuels and stoves to cook their food. The negative impact of traditional cooking on young people is substantial, both in terms of the size of the youth population affected and the cross-cutting nature of the adverse impacts on youth.

This session will be comprised of youth who are leading on clean cooking and sustainable energy to demonstrate why equitable decision-making with the inclusion of young people in the clean cooking sector is essential for sustainable progress. The panel discussion will showcase what young entrepreneurs and innovators are doing to tackle clean cooking challenges and what support youth leaders need to scale their efforts.

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Opinion on the role of end-user subsidies for high quality stove and fuels (e.g. ISO Tier 4-5 for efficiency and emissions) stoves and fuels is often divided into two camps; those who view end-user subsidies, especially freely distributed stoves, as inappropriate tools that risk reducing willingness to pay and distorting market structures, and those that see end-user subsidies as a necessary tool to ensure that socially beneficial solutions like clean cooking are accessible at the last mile and affordable for those at the base of the pyramid. While subsidies typically provide a partial reduction in price, the recent revival of carbon markets is making 100% subsidies on clean cooking products more common in the clean cooking industry. In light of national experiences with household energy subsidies in places like Ecuador, India, and Indonesia, it is opportune to better understand the risks and opportunities of end-user subsidies in the development of sustainable clean cooking markets.

The first part of the session will be structured as a debate with panelists responding to the proposition “Large end-user subsidies for high quality stoves and fuels do more harm than good in the development of sustainable clean cooking markets”.

The second part of the session will be a moderated discussion between the panelists based on some of the views presented during the debate, rebuttals, brainstorming about how smart, targeted subsidies might change the equation, and questions from the audience.

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Project Drawdown, which analyzes scenarios to avert catastrophic climate change, ranks clean cooking as the sixth most impactful climate solution in a list of nearly one hundred of the most effective climate mitigation strategies to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C. And yet, clean cooking is one of the most underfunded climate and development solutions in the world. The time has come for the clean cooking sector to claim its place at the table and own its indispensable role in the fight against climate change.

Many countries have already taken notice that fighting climate change means advancing clean cooking access. A total of 67 nations include household energy or clean cooking-related goals in their NDCs. But we must transform these commitments into action. Countries need the support, the expertise, and, above all, the money to rapidly scale up clean cooking access and deliver the tremendous climate benefits that come with it.

This session will focus on country-level efforts to achieve climate goals through clean cooking and the need for a massive infusion of funding from diverse sources to realize these untapped climate wins.

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It is increasingly recognized that safeguarding nature is critical to addressing climate change and protecting billions of the most vulnerable people around the world. Yet, as governments, donors and investors look for ways to protect and restore nature, they often overlook one of the most accessible and impactful solutions: clean cooking.

Approximately 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions from forest degradation are derived from woodfuel harvest. Reducing the firewood demands of local communities should be core to nature-based solutions where communities lack access to more efficient and cleaner stoves and fuels. The avoidance of emissions from shifting to clean cooking should be considered a central activity for ensuring the “permanence” of nature-based carbon removals through reforestation, while also enabling a transformation of rural livelihoods.

With $133 billion flowing into nature each year, and calls to triple that by 2050, now is the time to leverage intensified interest in nature to align finance for nature-based solutions and clean cooking to transform sustainable rural livelihoods. Failure to invest in clean cooking puts millions of lives at risk, threatens to undermine billions of dollars in climate mitigation investments – and imperils the future of all of us and our planet.

This session will highlight the fundamental role of clean cooking in delivering and achieving the benefits of nature-based solutions. Illustrating how clean cooking enterprises and conservation organizations are leveraging clean cooking value chains to deliver inclusive and sustainable rural development and ensure long-term success of nature-based solutions, and it discuss the key financing barriers and opportunities to align and scale clean cooking approaches with nature-based solutions.

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Today, it can take up to two years for certification standards to issue high quality, trusted carbon credits. These long payment timelines can cause cash flow issues for the clean cooking companies supplying the carbon credits and waiting on the associated revenues, but on the demand-side, buyers need external validation that the carbon credits that they purchase are acceptable. Today’s verification processes are time consuming and costly, because they rely on self-reported data from clean cooking companies that need to be scrutinized by independent human experts. Blockchain-based issuance of carbon credits could drastically shorten the time needed for carbon program results verification, and in doing so, could speed up the growth of the clean cooking sector.

This session will allow the audience to learn of the latest blockchain developments in clean cooking from sector experts, provide a platform to share experiences on using blockchain technology in clean cooking, and explore the potential for digital contract management using a distributed ledger.

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Join us following the Closing Plenary for a reception and musical performance by two-time Grammy nominee and Clean Cooking Champion Rocky Dawuni.

The final day of the Clean Cooking Forum will facilitate a range of action-oriented meetings hosted by the Clean Cooking Alliance and partners to drive momentum and pave the way for much needed action.

This workshop will explore opportunities and challenges related to collaboration between large corporates and small and medium sized companies in the electric cooking sector, and how these collaborations might best be facilitated. If you are interested in attending this workshop, please email Nick Rousseau at n.rousseau@lboro.ac.uk.  Please set out who you are, your organization and explain your interest in the topic. Numbers will be limited so we cannot guarantee everyone will be able to join.

Hosted by: Ghana Ministry of Energy, Energy Commission, and Ghana Alliance for Clean Cooking.

Ghana is considered as one of the leading countries in Sub-Sahara Africa with significant progress towards clean cooking access for its population. The purpose of the “Post-Conference Ghana Workshop” is to create opportunity for the Government, together with its local and Global partners and stakeholders to reflect on the new perspectives, frameworks and recommendations of the Forum, to strengthen the country’s position and strategies for harnessing new investments/financing and partnership opportunities for accelerating the achievement of the country’s clean cooking targets.

For additional details, click here.