Africa: Follow the Money – Is Africa’s $3.1b Clean Cooking Boom Reaching Households?

Africa has attracted $3.1 billion in commitments to expand clean cooking since the International Energy Agency held its inaugural Clean Cooking Summit in 2024. As this financing reaches the sector, the key question is no longer simply how much has been pledged, but whether it is reaching households and creating lasting access to cleaner cooking.

As of September 2026, nearly one billion Africans still lacked access to clean cooking. Addressing this crisis requires solutions grounded in the realities of African households, rather than shaped primarily by ideology.

That is the rationale behind WePlanet Africa’s Just Stop Cooking campaign, launched last year to challenge the prevailing clean-cooking narrative and advocate for Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG), despite its status as a fossil fuel.

At first glance, an environmental NGO promoting a fossil fuel may seem contradictory. Yet an estimated 850,000 people die each year from household air pollution, while charcoal and firewood production continue to drive forest loss across Africa. Promoting electric cooking as the sole solution—when it may not be viable at scale for decades—would ignore the circumstances facing millions of households.

LPG offers one of the fastest and most practical routes away from polluting fuels in Africa. The fact that it receives roughly 50% of clean-cooking finance reflects, in our view, a pragmatic response to this urgent challenge.

To assess the sector’s progress, it is necessary to follow the money.

How much funding has actually been released?

According to the International Energy Agency, nearly $740 million of the $2.2 billion pledged at the 2024 summit had been disbursed by June 2026.

Of that amount, approximately 84% went to the private sector and 16% to the public sector.

Which countries received the funding?

Disbursements supported projects in 28 African countries.

* Kenya received 19%, making it the largest individual recipient.

* Uganda received 7%.

* Tanzania received 7%.

* South Africa received 7%.

* Senegal received 5%.

* Côte d’Ivoire received 4%.

* Mozambique received 4%.

* Zimbabwe received 3%.

* Other recipient countries received no more than 3% each.

Around 75% of the investment was assigned to individual countries, while the remaining 25% supported cross-cutting initiatives that could not readily be attributed to one location.

The figures for East Africa are particularly notable. Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania together account for 33% of the country-specific investment.

This makes East Africa a crucial test of whether clean-cooking finance can be converted into sustained household use.

Which technologies and fuels received financing?

LPG attracted by far the largest share of funding:

* LPG: 49%.

* Multi-fuel and cross-technology programmes: 26%.

* Improved biomass technologies: 17%.

* Electric cooking: 7%.

* Biogas: 1%.

Financing also flowed across different stages of the clean-cooking value chain:

* End-use equipment: 66%.

* Technical assistance and market development: 14%.

* Capitalisation of investment funds or companies: 13%.

* Fuel-supply infrastructure: 7%.

This distribution is significant. With nearly half of the investment directed toward LPG, the fuel has emerged as a central component of Africa’s clean-cooking transition.

The question of accountability, however, remains unresolved.

The amount pledged is known, and growing detail is now available on what has been disbursed, where it has gone and which technologies have benefited.

What remains unclear is what happened at the end of that financing chain.

How many households gained access? How many continue to use LPG and other cleaner fuels? Can families afford those fuels and obtain them reliably over time?

Those outcomes—not financial announcements alone—should determine whether billions of dollars in clean-cooking investment are producing meaningful change.

WePlanet Africa’s recommendation

This momentum is significant. WePlanet Africa commends the International Energy Agency, the African Union, partner Western governments and African governments for treating the clean-cooking crisis with the urgency it deserves.

For East Africa in particular, governments should strengthen regional LPG supply resilience by expanding storage capacity, increasing local and regional bottling infrastructure, and harmonising policies and tariffs to facilitate the movement of LPG and related equipment across East African Community borders.

Additional clean-cooking finance should therefore support more stable and locally rooted LPG supply chains. Reliable access to affordable fuel is essential if households are to adopt cleaner cooking and maintain its use over the long term.

Clean-cooking finance should not be measured solely by the amounts pledged and disbursed.

That money must be traceable all the way to households, allowing us to answer the most important question:

Who is benefiting?

The writer is WePlanet Africa’s Regional Head.

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