African leaders attending this year’s UN Climate Change Conference, COP29 have highlighted the urgent crisis posed by lack of access to clean cooking, a challenge impacting 1.2 billion people across Africa and leading to millions of premature deaths annually.
The nexus between clean cooking, deforestation, health and overall health goals reveals a story of challenges and opportunities that must be tackled to reduce the impact of climate change in Africa.
The annual cost of exposure to air pollution is an estimated $791.4 billion, with health impacts totalling $526.3 billion.
More than 83% of people in sub-Saharan Africa rely on traditional biomass fuels.
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Africa, where nearly 1 billion of the world’s 2.3 billion people lack access to clean cooking, loses about 3.9 million hectares of forest each year due to poor cooking methods.
“Clean cooking is not just a health issue; it is a matter of human dignity. We cannot allow our sisters and mothers to suffer in silence while we have the power to change this… We must mobilize at least $4 billion annually to achieve universal access to clean cooking by 2030,” Kevin Kariuki, African Development Bank (AfDB) Group Vice President for Power, Energy, Climate & Green Growth said.
At the Paris meeting in May 2024, African Development Bank President Dr. Akinwumi Adesina committed 20% of the bank’s budget to energy projects that promote clean cooking. The public and private sectors have committed $2.2 billion to improve cooking practices across Africa.
From 2000 to 2020, the number of people without access to clean cooking in SSA increased significantly. This growth outpaced the increase in visits over the same period. This is symptomatic of a larger challenge that has led to the global goal of providing access to clean energy for all, as expressed in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG 7).
