When a Kenyan mother lights a firewood stove to prepare the evening meal, she is not thinking about climate diplomacy at the United Nations. She is thinking about feeding her family at the lowest cost possible. Yet that simple daily decision is now at the centre of an international conversation in which Kenya has secured a leading role.
On Tuesday, at the United Nations headquarters in New York, Kenya and Norway co-hosted a high-level event on clean cooking, setting the stage for the second Africa Clean Cooking Summit to be held in Nairobi on January 27 and 28 next year.
Kenya will co-host the summit with Norway and the United States, in collaboration with the International Energy Agency, the African Union Commission and the African Development Bank.
For Kenya, this is an opportunity to show that clean cooking is not simply an environmental programme. It is an economic issue involving household spending, jobs, manufacturing, energy access and public health.
The Ministry of Energy and Petroleum estimates that 9.1 million Kenyan households, about 69 percent, rely primarily on traditional cooking fuels. Firewood accounts for more than half of household cooking nationally and is particularly dominant in rural areas.
Kenya’s National Cooking Transition Strategy, developed under the Ministry of Energy and Petroleum, targets universal access to clean cooking by 2028.
It is explicitly linked to Vision 2030, the country’s ambition to become a newly industrialising, middle-income economy providing a high quality of life in a clean and secure environment. The transition cannot be achieved by simply telling households to stop using firewood and charcoal.
At the UN event, President William Ruto made the point that millions of people depend on charcoal and firewood for their livelihoods. ‘A transition that ignores them will not endure,’ he said.
Kenya is pursuing a multi-fuel approach including LPG, electricity, bioethanol, biogas and sustainable biomass. The Government has also identified a $600 million investment opportunity in institutional clean cooking covering schools, healthcare facilities and correctional services.
This creates an opportunity for Kenyan manufacturers, distributors, financiers and technology firms. The international money is also beginning to move. The 2024 Paris summit generated $2.2 billion in commitments, while the IEA says $740 million has already been deployed through projects in 22 African countries. The Nairobi summit should now push that capital closer to households.
The test will not be how many commitments are announced in Nairobi. It will be whether a rural mother can afford a cleaner stove, whether a school can replace a smoky kitchen or whether investors can build viable businesses around the transition.
Kenya has brought clean cooking from the kitchen to the UN agenda. The next step is to bring investment, innovation and affordable solutions back from New York to the Kenyan household.