Your Excellency, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed,
The vision you articulated at the Second Africa Climate Summit (ACS2) was not only ambitious but necessary. You invited Africa to begin not with what it lacks, but with what it has: the youngest population in the world, vast renewable potential, deep natural carbon vaults, fertile land, and a tradition of resilience. You framed Africa not as a victim pleading for survival, but as a visionary architect of the next climate economy. This is the leadership narrative Africa deserves.
Yet for a vision to be credible, it must rest on strategic priorities that yield the greatest return for our people, our economies, and our planet. Here lies the paradox at the heart of Ethiopia’s—and Africa’s—climate strategy: we celebrate monumental symbols of green power while neglecting the single most impactful and cost-effective intervention available to us. That intervention is not a dam, or even a tree-planting campaign, as critical as those are. It is the daily, life-or-death issue of clean cooking.
The Devastating Cost of a Blind Spot
You rightly highlighted Ethiopia’s National Clean Cooking Roadmap. Yet nine out of ten Ethiopian households remain trapped in toxic dependence on biomass fuels. This is not merely a health crisis. It is a strategic drain on every one of our national ambitions.
The daily scramble for firewood erodes the very forests your tree-planting campaign seeks to restore. The annual cost of inaction on clean cooking in Ethiopia is an estimated seventy-two billion dollars—a staggering sum that represents more than fourteen times the cost of building the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, every single year. And the stakes are not only domestic. If Ethiopia were to achieve a full transition to clean cooking, it would have the third-largest impact on global surface temperature, behind only China and India, despite having less than a tenth of their populations. This is Africa’s unparalleled leverage on the global stage—and we are failing to use it.
A Failure of Strategy, Not Solutions
This crisis does not persist because of a lack of technology or knowledge. It persists because of a failure of strategy and governance. Clean cooking remains institutionally orphaned: splintered across ministries, with no clear owner, no dedicated budget, and no accountability.
Past stove programs reveal the problem clearly. Millions of devices were distributed, but poor design made them unsuitable for real household use. Lack of after-sales service and spare parts meant they were quickly abandoned. Monitoring was limited to counting stoves handed out, not whether families actually used them. Meanwhile, fiscal policy made matters worse: clean fuels and technologies were subject to import duties and taxes, while unsustainable biomass remained the cheapest option. The result was predictable—people stuck with firewood, forests kept falling, and smoke kept filling kitchens.
The issue, therefore, is not a shortage of ideas or capacity, but the absence of political will to treat clean cooking as the keystone of our climate and development agenda.
The Exhibition as a Metaphor for Neglect
The ACS2 exhibition captured this neglect in vivid symbolism. Of thirty-four booths, ten promoted imported electric vehicles, eight showcased solar, and five were reserved for international NGOs. Only three addressed clean cooking, and two of those were foreign or narrowly focused on injera baking.
Exhibitors paid three hundred thousand birr or more for booths, often at enormous sacrifice. The ministry organizing the event was relentless in pursuing payments—calling repeatedly and even visiting in person to ensure collection. Yet as far as we observed, not a single minister, mayor, or senior official visited the exhibition—not the clean cooking displays, not the solar stands, not even the sleek vehicles.
The location only reinforced the marginalization. The entire exhibition was pushed into a tent outside, while leaders remained in the main building for speeches and side meetings. Large items like vehicles may belong outdoors, but smaller, people-centered innovations like clean cooking should have been integrated into the corridors of the main venue, where they could not be ignored. Instead, innovation was left outside while rhetoric filled the halls inside.
The Credibility Gap
Your speech proposed an African Climate Innovation Compact to deliver one thousand solutions by 2030 and a bid for Ethiopia to host COP32 in Addis Ababa in 2027. These are bold ambitions we should all support. But they raise an unavoidable question of credibility—one already voiced by African Union Commission Chair Mahamoud Ali Youssouf, who reminded us that credibility “will not be judged by eloquence, but by the delivery of results.”
How can Africa credibly promise one thousand future solutions when it cannot reliably deliver the one solution most critical to its people today that costs the continent an estimated $800 billion every year? How can Ethiopia present itself as host for a global climate summit while failing to assign a minister, a budget, and measurable key performance indicators to clean cooking? Unless we close this gap, our innovation compact risks becoming just another declaration.
The Continental Pattern
This credibility gap is not uniquely Ethiopian. It is the African pattern. The first Africa Climate Summit in Nairobi generated over twenty billion dollars in pledges. Yet to this day, there is no transparent accounting of how much has actually materialized. That silence tells its own story: external financing is not a reliable foundation.
The pattern repeats itself in sector after sector. Grand pledges are announced with great fanfare, but citizens rarely see tangible results on the ground. Without transparency and accountability, the promise of climate finance is reduced to press releases. If Africa cannot show the world that commitments made in Nairobi led to real outcomes, why should the world take new promises made in Addis seriously? Pledges are not progress. Speeches are not solutions.
A Blueprint for Credible Leadership
Our rejoinder, then, is not a rejection of your vision, but a proposal for how to make it credible. Before we inaugurate another dam, launch another compact, or bid for another COP, we must first demonstrate competence where it matters most. We must make the Clean Cooking Roadmap the pilot project for a new era of African delivery.
This requires three immediate actions: first, Name a minister-level champion with an exclusive mandate, a published budget, and the authority to deliver measurable results. Second, Commission a transparent public audit of past failures to explain why stove programs collapsed and institutional orphanhood persists. And third, Defend a significant, dedicated clean cooking budget line in Ethiopia’s national budget, ensuring external investment matches domestic commitment rather than substituting for it.
Imagine the signal this would send. Households across Ethiopia breathing clean air. Forests regenerating instead of being stripped bare. A government able to say not only that it has a roadmap, but that it has delivered measurable results. This is the credibility Africa needs to lead.
From Rhetoric to Delivery
Your Excellency, we share your dream of an Africa that leads. But leadership is earned through competence and credibility, not rhetoric. Africa cannot ask the world to replace climate aid with climate investment while we fail to replace climate rhetoric with climate delivery.
Let the African Climate Innovation Compact begin with one profound innovation: a government that delivers on its most fundamental promise to its own people. Let clean cooking be the keystone that proves our model of development works. Then, when we invite the world to Addis Ababa, we will not only be hosting a conference—we will be showcasing a blueprint. The transition from climate aid to climate investment begins not with a plea, but with a demonstration.
Tsegaye Nega is a Professor Emeritus at Carleton College in the United States and the Founder and CEO of Anega Energies Manufacturing.
Contributed by Tsegaye Nega
