Rockefeller Foundation, partners unveil modern cooking technologies  in Africa

Oritsegbubemi Omatseyin

Lagos — As part of the International Energy Agency’s, IEA, 2026 Ministerial, the Rockefeller Foundation, Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet Inc., Clean Cooking Alliance, and Energy Corps have launched the “Clean Cooking Accelerator Initiative.”

The Initiative, designed to expand access to modern cooking technologies in Africa, was announced during the High-Level Dialogue on Advancing Energy Access and Cooking Solutions, which was chaired by Sophie Hermans, Deputy Prime Minister, Netherlands, and Dr. Fatih Birol, IEA Executive Director, and featured opening remarks from Opiyo Wandayi, Kenya’s Minister of Energy and Petroleum, The Hon. Chris Wright, U.S. Secretary of Energy, and Terje Lien Aasland, Norway’s Minister of Energy.

The Clean Cooking Accoeleratr Initiative reflects the organizations’ renewed commitment to achieving universal access to clean cooking in Africa, while helping to improve health, save lives, empower women and children, create local jobs and build economic opportunity, and reduce forest degradation across the continent.

Approximately one billion people in Africa rely on traditional fuels such as wood and charcoal, contributing to household air pollution that the World Health Organization associates with more than 810,000 premature deaths annually.

These fuels and appliances significantly increase household air pollution for families in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially women and children, and the associated health risks, such as respiratory illnesses.

The IEA, which also identified clean cooking as a defining challenge for Africa’s prosperity, estimates that closing the global clean cooking gap requires more than $2 billion per year.

While significant progress has been made in expanding access to clean cooking in parts of the world, this progress has been uneven.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, population growth has outpaced gains in access, and the gap continues to widen by an estimated 14 million people per year as the number of those without clean cooking solutions increases.

Clean cooking solutions, including electric, biogas, bioethanol, liquid petroleum gas and efficient biomass stoves, produce far fewer harmful particles compared to wood or charcoal.

Rapidly increasing access to clean cooking is also an integral component of Mission 300, an initiative led by the World Bank and African Development Bank, with support from The Rockefeller Foundation, Global Energy Alliance, Sustainable Energy for All, and others, to provide 300 million Africans with electricity by 2030.

Starting in approximately half a dozen countries to be announced in the coming month, the Clean Cooking Accelerator Initiative aims to expand to additional Sub-Saharan African countries that request support and demonstrate readiness and momentum toward universal access in Africa to clean cooking.

The overarching aim is improving health, saving lives, empowering women and children, reducing forest degradation, creating local jobs, and building economic opportunity across the continent.

The Clean Cooking Accelerator Initiative seeks to get cleaner cooking methods to more people by coordinating technical expertise, catalytic capital, and implementation support. While each participating organization is already pursuing efforts to advance clean cooking, the Clean Cooking Accelerator Initiative will bring the organizations together around certain efforts and allow for information sharing to maximize collective impact.

Working in countries that express interest and demonstrated readiness, the Initiative will support efforts to strengthen supply chains and invest in infrastructure to scale modern cooking solutions.

In select markets, The Rockefeller Foundation through its Mission 300 Accelerator housed within RF Catalytic Capital, its charitable spin-off and Energy Corps are providing support to CoAction Global to develop a cohort of Clean Cooking Fellows to strengthen institutional capacity and develop investable project pipelines. CoAction Global, an independent nonprofit impact accelerator facilitating innovation and investment in especially hard-to-reach places, manages the Mission 300 Fellowship programme.

“The Rockefeller Foundation and its Mission 300 Accelerator are thrilled to be working with these organizations to take on an incredible development opportunity: expanding access to clean, modern cooking methods. There are smart, easy solutions that can prevent hundreds of thousands of people needlessly dying from indoor air pollution each year, and we are excited to try to drive investment into solving this problem,” said Andrew Herscowitz, CEO of the Mission 300 Accelerator, RF Catalytic Capital, Inc.

Dymphna van der Lans, CEO of the Clean Cooking Alliance said: “We’re seeing real momentum behind clean cooking across Africa, but momentum alone doesn’t deliver solutions to households, schools and institutions. What matters now is building the capacity, partnerships, and market foundations that allow countries to move from targets to implementation. This collaboration is an important step in making that shift possible.”

As a nonprofit working to end energy poverty by connecting local leadership with global energy expertise, philanthropy, and NGO organization, Energy Corps will channel philanthropic capital to mobilize private-sector investment and industrial capacity. This support will strengthen capacity building and investment in bankable projects to address supply-chain and infrastructure bottlenecks.

“This Initiative is built to turn commitment into real projects, real infrastructure, and real access by mobilizing more capital,” Toby Rice, CEO and Founder of Energy Corps said.

Woochong Um, CEO of the Global Energy Alliance stated: “The Global Energy Alliance has seen firsthand how electric cooking can transform lives, already reaching over 26,000 people in Kenya and Uganda through our Productive Use Financing Facility (PUFF). 

“As a founding member of the Global Electric Cooking Coalition, we are committed to scaling these solutions continent-wide, coordinating with governments to support CDMUs that provide critical, long-term planning and delivery capacity. The Clean Cooking Accelerator Initiative supercharges this momentum, aligning with Mission 300 to build resilient energy systems and empower communities through local, expert-led implementation.”