From Smoke to Solutions: Why Clean Cooking in Africa’s Institutions Could Spark the Continent’s Energy Transformation
Africa can’t achieve its energy and climate goals if schools, hospitals, and prisons keep cooking with wood. Transforming these kitchens into clean, modern hubs could unlock better health, stronger economies, and a greener future.
By Ambassador Ali D. Mohamed and Benson Ireri
Walk into a school kitchen in rural Kenya, or a hospital kitchen in Uganda, or a prison kitchen in Nigeria, and you’ll likely find the same scene: giant pots perched on blackened stoves, logs stacked high, and smoke hanging thick in the air. It’s the daily backdrop to millions of meals that keep pupils learning, patients healing, and inmates fed.
© Andy Higgins for World Food Programme
These kitchens are the beating heart of public service. They keep education systems functioning, hospitals running, and entire communities steady. But the fuel behind them is a quiet saboteur, and firewood and charcoal, cheap in the short term, are costing Africa dearly.
Across the continent, forests are falling faster than they can grow back; cooks are breathing in toxic smoke that slowly strangles their health; carbon emissions are piling up, nudging the planet closer to crisis; and, ironically, the money institutions spend on fuel eats into the very budgets meant for books, medicines, and care.
It’s an uncomfortable truth that the way Africa cooks its institutional meals is undermining its future. And that’s why clean cooking in schools, hospitals, and prisons should not be treated as some side project, but as an anchor for the continent’s energy transition and a lever to improve education, health, climate resilience, and even government finances. And with global attention shifting towards clean cooking, this is the moment to move.
Why institutions matter now
Household clean cooking has long dominated the headlines, but institutional kitchens are an overlooked giant. Take schools, for instance. Across sub-Saharan Africa, school kitchens burn an estimated 8 million tonnes of firewood a year, producing 12 to 14 million tonnes of greenhouse gases. That’s more than the annual emissions of some small countries. If those same schools switched to clean cooking, they would unlock up to US$668 million annually through carbon finance alone, and that’s a potential revenue stream to underwrite the transition.
Kenya shows how stark the numbers are. Around 90% of the country’s 46,000 schools still rely on firewood. A single primary school burns about 180 tonnes of firewood per year, while a boarding secondary can hit 300 tonnes. Nationally, that’s up to 6.9 million tonnes of wood, costing schools KES15 billion (about US$115 million) annually.
Now, imagine flipping the script. Studies suggest that switching Kenya’s schools to clean cooking could deliver US$109 million in benefits every year, once you factor in health improvements, reduced deforestation, and climate gains.
And that’s just schools. Add in hospitals and prisons, and the opportunity balloons. Yet, despite this, institutional clean cooking has long been the “missing middle,” ignored by both household-focused programs and big-ticket energy projects.
Why the lag
The reasons institutional clean cooking has been left behind are depressingly familiar. For years, energy planning has fixated on connection numbers, or how many schools or clinics can be plugged into the grid, without thinking about what those institutions actually need to cook a meal. The result is a generation of schools technically connected to electricity, yet still chained to firewood because their kitchens can’t run on the thin, single-phase lines or undersized breakers provided.
Responsibility is also scattered. Cooking in public institutions cuts across ministries of energy, education, health, corrections, finance, and environment, but coordination is weak, leaving no single champion to drive change. Thin institutional budgets make matters worse. Schools and hospitals prioritize keeping meals on the table, so there’s little left for infrastructure upgrades. Add in the wild swings of fuel prices, the unpredictability of tariffs, and the added risk of importing appliances in volatile currency markets, and planning becomes a nightmare.
On top of this, there are glaring data gaps. Most governments cannot say with confidence how much energy their institutions use, or what it costs, making it nearly impossible for investors and suppliers to size up the market. And then there is the issue of finance itself. Traditional loans are ill-suited to institutions with irregular revenue flows, grant funding has been sporadic at best, and tailored financing instruments have often been under-developed. Meanwhile, carbon markets, which could be transformative, have remained underused, thanks to gaps in methodology and weak systems for monitoring, reporting, and verifying impact.
The combined effect of these problems has been stagnation, with institutional clean cooking stuck in small-scale pilots while the real demand in thousands of kitchens across the continent remains shrouded in smoke.
Shift on the horizon
But the tide is turning. Governments are beginning to elevate clean cooking politically, embedding it in national strategies and, crucially, giving it attention from the highest levels of leadership. Delivery units, small but powerful teams reporting directly to political offices, are now driving “whole-of-government” approaches that cut across ministries. The Clean Cooking Alliance is helping delivery units to not only carry out national priorities, but also to form an international network that supports learning and collaboration.
Technology is also helping. Digital systems that monitor energy use and track emissions reductions are making clean cooking projects more measurable, and therefore more investable. For carbon markets, this is a game-changer, creating the kind of integrity and aggregation that can attract serious finance.
And money, at last, is flowing. This year alone, the global clean cooking push mobilized US$2.2 billion in pledges, a solid down payment on the US$4 billion the International Energy Agency says Africa needs annually to deliver universal access by 2030.
Institutional kitchens are now poised to become catalysts. Schools and hospitals can create the kind of “anchor demand” that builds markets for new fuels and technologies. Where electric cooking makes sense, they can also drive up grid consumption, giving utilities a reliable source of revenue. In Kenya, for instance, although three-quarters of schools are connected to the grid, most of their kitchens are not, and while that’s a glaring gap, it is also an immediate opportunity.
The case for schools
School feeding programs make the opportunity even stronger. More than 53 million children across sub-Saharan Africa receive school meals, and cooking those meals cleanly would have ripple effects well beyond the kitchen. It would save budgets now spent on wood, improve nutrition delivery, and channel more value into local economies.
International organizations and philanthropies like the World Food Programme, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, and the Novo Nordisk Foundation are already demonstrating how integrating clean cooking into school-feeding systems can work. In Kenya, the government’s ambition to expand school meals to 10 million children by 2030 provides a ready-made policy hook and a demand signal large enough to attract suppliers and financiers at scale.
Partnerships are beginning to form. Kenya’s Ministry of Education, working with the National Council for Nomadic Education, has launched the “Zero Carbon Schools” initiative, which is now building the analytics and financing models to scale clean cooking transitions across thousands of school kitchens.
© Nick Wambugu for Clean Cooking Alliance
What needs to change
To scale this across Africa, we need five big shifts.
First, data must be treated as the foundation. Investors cannot finance what they cannot see, and policymakers cannot plan what they cannot measure. Governments should create open, geo-referenced registries of institutional kitchens, detailing their type, size, current fuel use, monthly spend, and grid connection. With that, planners can match each institution to the least-cost clean cooking technology, whether it be electric, solar hybrid, biogas, or advanced biomass.
Second, clean cooking needs to be integrated into national and local energy plans. Too often, schools are “connected” to the grid in name only, with power systems too weak to run a modern kitchen. Planning standards should require proper wiring, three-phase power where needed, safe earthing, and metering. Without this, electric cooking will remain a non-starter.
Third, the finance stack must be rebuilt. Clean cooking has long been starved of investment. Between 2013 and 2018, the entire sector averaged just US$32 million a year in tracked commitments across high-impact countries. In 2022, the figure dropped to US$27 million. Compare that to the US$4 billion Africa needs every year. In Kenya alone, the gap is about US$40 million annually. Closing it will require a layered approach, with philanthropy to fund targeting and design, concessional loans for infrastructure, guarantees to de-risk banks, and carbon finance to cover both upfront and ongoing costs.
Fourth, countries need practical roadmaps. Data and money only move when there’s a clear plan. A three-to-five-year roadmap should spell out which institutions will transition when, how much it will cost, which technologies will be used, and who is responsible. With that, funders see a pipeline, implementers see a schedule, and ministries see a budget.
Finally, coordination must improve. Clean cooking touches too many ministries to succeed without top-level leadership. A coordination platform reporting to the highest political office, and backed by a strong delivery unit, is the best way to cut through bureaucracy and turn intent into action.
© World Food Programme
The road ahead
As the continent heads towards the second Africa Climate Summit in Addis Ababa and onwards to COP30 in Belem, Brazil, the message is clear: institutional clean cooking must be at the center of Africa’s energy transformation. Schools, hospitals, and prisons are not side issues but the foundations on which education, health, and justice stand.
Development partners can accelerate progress by supporting governments to publish clean cooking pipelines and empower delivery units. Funders can back blended finance windows and digital monitoring systems that give credibility to carbon markets. Philanthropies funding school meals can build in clean cooking as standard.
The prize is enormous: cleaner air for cooks and children, stronger budgets for schools and hospitals, healthier forests, a more resilient climate, and a continent that is no longer feeding its future with firewood smoke.
Ambassador Ali Mohamed is the Special Envoy for Climate Change in the Executive Office of the President, Republic of Kenya. Benson Ireri is the head of the clean cooking delivery unit within the office of the special envoy for climate.
