Africa Clean Cooking Record & Access Gap: IEA 2026 Report

New IEA figures show sub-Saharan Africa adding clean cooking access faster than at any point in history — while the number of people left behind climbed by roughly 14 million in a single year. Both facts are true at once, and together they define the continent's real challenge. 

01A record run, measured honestly

Start with what went right. An estimated 12 million people across sub-Saharan Africa switched to clean cooking in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency's Clean Cooking in Africa 2026 progress report. In 2025 that figure climbed to roughly 15 million — a quicker yearly expansion than any since regional tracking began — and early signals point to another step up in 2026.

The global backdrop explains why this matters. Close to two billion people worldwide still cook over smoky fuels — firewood and charcoal above all — and close to half of that population sits in sub-Saharan Africa. Since 2010 the global total has fallen by half, driven overwhelmingly by national programmes in Asia. Africa never matched that curve — which is precisely why the IEA convened the first International Summit on Clean Cooking in Africa in Paris in 2024, where governments and investors lined up $2.2 billion in pledges, the largest coordinated commitment the sector has received.

02Follow the money — and its pace

Capital is moving, but in installments. Sector funding rose from $590 million four years earlier to $770 million in 2024, and about a third of the headline $2.2 billion had reached projects on the ground two years after the summit. Progress is also geographically lopsided: five countries claim almost three out of every four new connections made in the past half-decade. For programme developers, that concentration is a signal — both of proven delivery models worth replicating, and of markets where competition for beneficiaries is intensifying.

03Policy is doing the quiet lifting

Behind the headline numbers sits a regulatory shift. In the two years since Paris, upwards of 120 fresh clean cooking policies have landed across 30-plus African countries, and 31 governments have put formal roadmaps or strategy documents into print. Targets are no longer aspiration documents; several now carry fiscal backing, statutory timelines and named responsible ministries.

04Three national ledgers worth reading

Sierra Leone published its National Clean Cooking Strategy 2025–2035 in October 2025 and followed up with the ECOWAS LPG 20/20 initiative in May 2026. Its energy compact aims to lift access from 1.5% of the population today to 25% by 2030, backed by tariff relief that scrapped import duties on LPG cylinders, on improved stoves and on solar cooking kits. Full execution is costed at roughly $817.8 million.

Nigeria has committed to lifting annual access growth from about 22% to 25%, targeting universal coverage — around 227 million people — by 2030, against a current access rate of 27%. Closing that distance in four years would be without precedent anywhere.

Kenya set the continent's most aggressive deadline: a universal-access target of 2028 written into its National Cooking Transition Strategy. Household LPG uptake has climbed from under 5% in 2020 to roughly 15% today, yet independent tracking by IRENA suggests the current trajectory would still leave the country well short of its goal by decade's end.

The pattern across all three: targets are racing ahead of delivery capacity. Execution, not ambition, is now the binding constraint.

05The arithmetic problem

Here is the uncomfortable column of the ledger. In 2024, even as millions connected, the unserved population across sub-Saharan Africa still expanded by about 14 million, because demographic growth keeps outrunning the gains. The regional access rate stood at 23% — roughly one percentage point better than the year before.

Two structural facts shape where solutions must land. First, LPG dominates the access mix, supplying over 70% of those counted as clean, while electric cooking is the fastest-growing segment. Second, nearly 80% of those left unserved reside in the countryside, where cylinder logistics, spare-parts availability and household purchasing power are toughest to crack. In these last-mile settings, durable improved biomass stoves remain a practical complement to the fuel-switching agenda — which is why most national strategies still count them within their targets, and why carbon-finance programmes continue to distribute them at scale.

The gender dimension compounds the case for speed: roughly 800 million women and girls continent-wide still cook over polluting fuels, absorbing the smoke and the hours of fuel collection that come with it.

06What a 2040 finish would take

The IEA's scenario math is straightforward: if the pace set by the continent's fastest movers were replicated everywhere, Africa would erase its clean cooking deficit by 2040. The ingredients are equally explicit — sustained investment, follow-through on pledged funds, and policies that survive contact with implementation. What has changed in 2026 is not the formula but the plausibility: records are being set, money is moving, and the policy floor is higher than at any point in the sector's history.

The remaining question is execution at the last mile — and that is where stove manufacturing, distribution partnerships and carbon-project design meet. To date, SSM Eco has supplied more than 11.3 million stoves across six product lines — wood, charcoal, pellet, institutional, ethanol and electric — to households, institutions and carbon programmes worldwide.