Clean Cooking Is Africa’s Most Undervalued Energy Infrastructure Priority

The Invisible Infrastructure

Roads, power grids and pipelines are obvious infrastructure priorities. They can be seen and even photographed. Clean cooking is different. It is invisible until it is not. Soot-stained ceilings of kitchens, hours lost to collecting firewood, the coughing of a child. You will see it in the statistics, too, but the numbers are usually tragic. 950 million Africans still cook with charcoal and firewood. Nigeria loses over 100,000 people every year to indoor air pollution.

Yet, despite the scale and consequences, clean cooking is at best lodged in the margins of Africa’s energy discourse. It is barely framed as energy infrastructure, the same way gas pipelines and mini-grids are. Even worse, in investment meetings, clean cooking exists as the “soft” development concern, an afterthought, less urgent than power generation capacity or transmission lines. However, if we are to take energy access seriously, clean cooking exists right at the frontline.
I reckon the problem is that the infrastructure behind clean cooking is harder to see.

Compared to the monumental scale of a hydropower dam or solar farm, trucks delivering LPG cylinders, storage depots, and retail points tucked away in rural markets don’t seem like infrastructure and yet, the network is no less vital. Without it, all other energy targets, from reducing deforestation to lowering household emissions, begin to unravel.

The Economics of Neglect

The economics should make it a priority. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), over 70% of Africans currently lack access to clean cooking fuels. When summed up, the productivity losses run into billions. Forests carry the strain of unrelenting wood harvesting, health systems bear the cost of treating respiratory illnesses, and women and children lose hours every day to fuel collection. Hours that could be spent studying or earning income.

Yet, clean cooking captures less than 2% of the climate finance that flows into Africa. This is because donors and investors treat it as a development aid category item, rather than a bankable infrastructure sector item. It is the framing, and not a misunderstanding of its importance.

LPG and ethanol-based fuels should be considered as an intrinsic part of Africa’s energy transition architecture, a foundational layer alongside electrification. They offer a realistic, near-term pathway for households to move away from polluting fuels, especially in dense urban areas where grid-based solutions might not be feasible for years. But, for this shift to happen, there must be investment in hard assets, the distribution infrastructure, price stability mechanisms and last-mile delivery systems that can reliably serve tens of millions of households.

Spotlight on Nigeria

Nigeria is a striking case study of both the urgency and the opportunity.

● Scale of the problem: Around 174 million Nigerians still lack access to clean cooking. While earlier policy documents put LPG use at only 10% of households, newer surveys show a modest improvement; about 19% of households nationwide now use LPG as their primary cooking fuel. The disparity is sharp . Around 50% of urban households use LPG, but over 80% of rural households still rely on wood.

● Health toll: Indoor air pollution remains a silent killer. UNICEF estimates that in 2019 alone, nearly 50,000 Nigerian children under five died from pneumonia linked to household air pollution, with total premature deaths from air pollution exceeding 190,000 nationally.

● Policy ambition: Nigeria’s National Clean Cooking Policy Framework, approved in 2024, aims to transition 30 million households by 2030, aligning with the country’s broader Energy Transition Plan. But ambition without structural investment risks staying on paper.

Nigeria’s story mirrors the continental challenge; adoption is inching forward in cities, but rural access lags behind, and financing remains piecemeal. Without significant investment in distribution networks, affordability mechanisms, and safety standards, the gap will persist- with devastating human and economic costs.

One starting point could be blended finance platforms designed specifically for clean cooking infrastructure.

Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) ideally should absorb a part of the early-stage risk, allowing commercial capital to flow further into projects like bulk LPG storage terminals, ethanol processing facilities and cylinder manufacturing plants.
Pooled procurement facilities could also reduce costs.
Governments and regional blocs could negotiate bulk LPG purchases to secure better pricing, smooth supply fluctuations, and protect against currency volatility.

Carbon monetisation is another underused lever. The emission reductions from switching households from wood or charcoal to LPG are substantial, and yet, clean cooking projects have struggled to tap carbon markets at scale. A structured aggregation of carbon credits from millions of household-level transitions could create an additional revenue stream to finance infrastructure rollout.

Overcoming policy hurdles

However policy is where there are often bottlenecks. Many governments rely on ad-hoc subsidies that are fiscally unsustainable and politically expedient. Others leave price formation entirely to market forces, with predictable results, sudden spikes in LPG that would send households back to charcoal.

The middle ground is a framework of performance-based subsidies, incentives tied to measurable outcomes like numbers of households converted, cylinders deployed, or fuel volumes sold in underserved areas.

These subsidies, if well designed, do not have to be permanent. They could be phased out as soon as economies of scale bring down costs. The challenge is designing them so that they encourage distributors to serve rural and low-income households and communities, not just the affluent urban areas.

Fiscal measures could also help,and Kenya provides a vivid example. The government reduced import duties on energy-efficient cookstoves from 25% to 10%, and eliminated excise duty on ethanol used for cooking, thus helping to lower consumer costs and laying the groundwork for market growth. However, fiscal policy alone is not enough.

Incentives must be coordinated with safety regulation, quality standards, and distribution infrastructure. Expanding LPG or ethanol access without enforcing cylinder or stove safety standards can trigger accidents, erode public confidence, and stall adoption.

None of this is or will be easy. It requires governments to become infrastructure planners, moving on from being social policymakers. The temptation will be to treat clean cooking as a temporary bridge until universal electricity access arrives.

This time of thinking however ignores the reality that even under optimistic scenarios, hundreds of millions of Africans will remain reliant on thermal cooking fuels for decades. The question is whether those fuels will be clean and modern or dirty and dangerous.

There is also a cultural dimension that rarely shows up in infrastructure debates. Cooking is deeply personal. Fuel choice is often tied to taste preferences, cooking speed and identity. Nigerians, for instance, swear by charcoal-made jollof rice. Policies that ignore this dimension risk low adoption.

Some rural households might prefer a hybrid model such as LPG for quick meals and wood for slow cooking. The infrastructure must be flexible enough to accommodate cultural nuances and realities.
The investment opportunity

From an investor’s perspective, the opportunity is much broader than it appears. Clean cooking touches on energy, health, manufacturing, logistics and even fintech. Payment models such as pay-as-you-cook, enabled by mobile money or wallet solutions, could lower upfront cost barriers for low-income households. Logistics companies can also extend their reach through partnerships with local retailers. Cylinder manufacturing can create and consolidate domestic industrial capacity.

However, there is a risk of fragmentation. Without coordination, efforts are bound to scatter and fail altogether. A national policy framework matched with practical implementation plans could mitigate these risks.

The alternatives are a few donor-funded projects here and some private distributors there that do not achieve the scale needed to shift national fuel consumption patterns. Because at the core of this argument, targets alone do not build infrastructure.
This is where energy investors and ESG-focused institutional capital could play a catalytic role.

The Gulf specifically has both capital and strategic interests in expanding LPG markets. Similarly, ESG-focused institutional investors who are obliged to demonstrate tangible social and environmental impact could leverage the social and environmental aspect of clean cooking to be a perfect alignment for their mandates.

A structured partnership between African governments, DFIs, and investors could finance the large-scale infrastructure needed, while philanthropic capital could be the underwriter for last-mile delivery to harder-to-reach communities.

Philanthropy as an anchor has its limits. The private sector will only commit to development projects if the returns and risks are visible and manageable. This is exactly why African governments must begin to rebuild credibility through consistency in their regulatory process and establish predictable pricing frameworks.

Abrupt policy reversals, like subsidy removals without prior notice, have undermined investor confidence in the past. Stability has been proven to attract capital.

There is a danger in over-intellectualising all of this. At its core, clean cooking is about making it possible for a mother in Mombasa or Kaduna to cook dinner without risking her health long term.

It is about a child in rural Ghana spending their evenings studying instead of collecting firewood. These are not romanticisation; they are the day-to-day realities that energy policy often abstracts away.

This is a large part of the problem. The conversation is dominated by megawatts and grid kilometres. Something as domestic as cooking feels small, feels trivial.

However, small things multiplied across millions of households have the power to change the trajectory of economies. This small thing can free time, protect forests, reduce long-term health costs and cut emissions. This is core infrastructure.

A call to action

Treating clean cooking as infrastructure will not happen overnight. It requires political will, policy discipline, financing creativity, and a shift in our measure of progress.

However if Africa is serious about its energy transition, it must move clean cooking from the sidelines to the centre. It must be planned, funded and executed with the same seriousness as a power plant or gas pipeline project will get.

Infrastructure is not just what we build, but what sustains us every day. For the hundreds of millions of Africans in Africa, infrastructure begins in the kitchen.

It’s time for leaders to stop viewing clean cooking as a development problem and start treating it as the critical infrastructure it is.

Rolake Akinkugbe-Filani, Founder/CEO EnergyInc Advisors.