From September 8-10, 2025, Addis Ababa will host the Second Africa Climate Summit (ACS-2), under the banner “Accelerating Global Climate Solutions: Financing for Africa’s Resilient and Green Development.” Ethiopia will be in the global spotlight, presenting itself as a leader in climate diplomacy. But the country’s credibility as summit host will not be won with speeches about renewable power or carbon markets. It will be decided in its own kitchens.
Nine out of ten Ethiopian households rely on firewood, charcoal, or dung cakes for cooking. The result is a silent emergency: tens of thousands of premature deaths each year, billions of hours of women’s labor lost to fuel collection, and forests stripped faster than the government can replant them. The World Bank estimates this costs Ethiopia USD 72 billion annually—eroding nearly 40 percent of its GDP through health burdens, lost productivity, and environmental destruction.
This is not a domestic inconvenience; it is a public health catastrophe, a driver of climate instability, and the country’s largest opportunity for immediate emissions reduction. And yet, because it offers no ribbon-cuttings or political theater, clean cooking has been left institutionally orphaned. As Ethiopia welcomes Africa’s leaders, the test of its climate leadership begins at home.
The Hidden Costs of Inaction
The scale of Ethiopia’s cooking crisis is measurable—and staggering. This silent hemorrhage bleeds from three critical fronts.
First, health. More than 60,000 Ethiopians die prematurely each year from household air pollution—a death toll surpassing malaria, unsafe water, and undernutrition combined. Women and children bear the heaviest exposure, breathing toxic smoke at levels that consistently shatter WHO safety limits. The consequence is a silent, suffocating epidemic of pneumonia, stroke, heart disease, and severe burns that cripples families and overwhelms public clinics, costing an estimated USD 40 billion annually.
Second, gender and productivity. Every day, millions of women and girls sacrifice hours—often under threat of violence—collecting firewood or tending inefficient, smoky fires. Studies suggest Ethiopian women lose the equivalent of two months of productive labor per year to fuel collection alone. This is time stolen from farming, education, or enterprise—a USD 26 billion sacrifice to a daily chore the state has failed to solve.
The third is the environment—both local and global. Domestically, cooking demand consumes 1.3–1.5 billion trees annually, degrading half a million hectares of forest and costing another USD 5.5 billion through stripped soils, crippled watersheds, and intensified drought and flooding. This deforestation is fueled by a cooking culture that is also Ethiopia’s largest source of black carbon—a short-lived climate pollutant hundreds of times more potent than CO₂. The global impact of this is staggering: a 2022 UN Environment Programme report found that, due to its heavy reliance on biomass burning, Ethiopia has the third-largest potential impact on global surface temperatures if it achieves a full transition to clean cooking—ranking behind only China and India, despite having just a fraction of their population. This means solving Ethiopia’s kitchen crisis is not just a national priority; it is one of the world’s most efficient climate actions.
These numbers reveal what glossy summit speeches obscure: Ethiopia’s most expensive fuel is not diesel or gasoline—it is firewood. A resource miscast as ‘free’ is, in truth, bleeding the economy dry while the institutions meant to stem the flow remain absent.
Orphanhood in Practice — How Ethiopia’s Systems Fail Its People
A crisis of this magnitude, demands a robust, coordinated response. Instead, it meets with institutional silence. Clean cooking in Ethiopia does not fail for lack of solutions. Locally designed stoves, pellet fuels, and even thermoelectric systems exist. What fails is governance. Clean cooking is institutionally orphaned—no lead actor to coordinate across sectors, no accountability for outcomes, no structure to turn feedback into adaptation. Responsibility diffuses until it vanishes, and failure becomes cyclical.
In Ethiopia, this orphanhood is codified. Authority is splintered across at least three major agencies: the Ministry of Water and Energy sets stove distribution targets, the Ministry of Health tracks the staggering death toll from household air pollution, and the Environmental Protection Authority monitors deforestation driven by fuelwood demand. Each points to the problem, but none claims ownership of the solution beyond rhetoric. None defends a permanent budget line. Instead, 93 percent of financing comes from donors, leaving initiatives vulnerable to project cycles. Consequently, failures are documented, lamented, and repeated.
The most damning evidence lies in the graveyard of abandoned stoves. National programs have distributed millions of “improved” cookstoves, yet surveys consistently find abandonment rates of 40–80 percent within a year due to design flaws, breakage, and a complete lack of after-sales service. The critical failure was not the technology itself, but the orphaned system: when users reported problems, no agency had the mandate, budget, or incentive to fix them. The same flawed models were often redeployed in new regions, wasting millions and eroding public trust.
Policy incoherence is compounded by structural suffocation. Ethiopia imposes a 15 percent VAT on clean stoves and pellets—the very technologies meant to replace firewood. Access to space for manufacturing is extremely difficult and manufacturers face rents USD 3/SQM per month in government-owned industrial sheds, punitive tariffs on imported components, and no access to foreign exchange to buy spare parts. Banks, profitable yet risk-averse, extend no credit lines to clean energy for poor households or small manufacturers. As a result, home-grown technologies that could scale to millions remain trapped, while kerosene, charcoal, and LPG continue to dominate.
This pathology of orphanhood is a continental plague, visible in different forms across Africa’s regions, a crisis costing USD 800 billion continent-wide. The playbook of failure is sadly consistent:
In Kenya, the Ministry of Energy nominally “owns” the file but delegates implementation to a scattered ecosystem of NGOs, while county governments disclaim responsibility for rural access. The result is a stark urban-rural divide; LPG access has boomed in Nairobi and Mombasa but remains stagnant in the north and west, where affordability and distribution barriers persist. Even safety failures—like recurring stove explosions in informal settlements—have not triggered a systematic regulatory response, leaving the market fractured and trust broken.
Rwanda, often praised for its top-down clean energy ambition, has struggled with a different facet of orphanhood. It launched ambitious electric cooking pilots, but without deep coordination from the health or environment ministries. Programs depended almost entirely on external finance and were built on a fragile grid. When instability caused blackouts, users quietly returned to charcoal. There was no cross-governmental task force, no contingency plan, and no adaptive mechanism to pivot—the initiative simply stalled until donor evaluations exposed the collapse.
The pattern is not confined to East Africa. In Senegal, a once-lauded LPG butanization program stalled as subsidies became a fiscal burden, with no institution adaptive enough to pivot strategies to include the rural poor. Most damningly, Nigeria—Africa’s largest oil and gas producer—epitomizes the triumph of institutional failure over natural resource wealth. Despite its energy abundance, over 70% of its population relies on wood and charcoal, driving one of the world’s highest deforestation rates. The contradiction is glaring: a government that exports fossil fuels for revenue simultaneously presides over a domestic energy crisis that kills its citizens, with no ministry or agency held accountable for bridging this paralyzing gap.
The common thread is institutionalized indifference. Ministries count devices distributed but not used; donors fund isolated pilots but not the systems to sustain them; leaders launch strategies but fail to anchor them where accountability must live.
For Ethiopia, as it prepares to host Africa’s climate leadership, this orphanhood is its central credibility problem. A government that cannot design systems to listen to its citizens and fix a broken stove cannot credibly govern continental climate solutions. The crisis in the kitchen is a preview of the summit’s likely outcome: bold declarations that, without an accountable home institution to execute them, are destined to be abandoned.
Budgets as the Test of Credibility
Diagnosing orphanhood is straightforward. curing it requires a first, brutal step: governments must put their money where their mouth is. A dedicated, defended budget line for clean cooking is the clearest signal that the sector is no longer invisible. Without it, strategies remain aspirational, donor funding remains fragmented, and accountability remains elusive.
The gap between pledge and performance is stark. At the May 2024 Clean Cooking Summit, governments and development banks pledged over USD 2.2 billion to accelerate access, including an African Development Bank commitment of USD 200 million per year. Yet by mid-2025, less than 22 percent of those pledges—approximately USD 470 million—had been disbursed. This underscores a painful truth: the sector runs on declaratory momentum, not dependable capital.
For Nigeria, this is the ultimate paradox. A nation that earns billions from hydrocarbon exports cannot find a sustainable fiscal pathway to shift its citizens from charcoal to clean fuels. For Ethiopia, the math is even more scandalous: the annual USD 72 billion cost of inaction could fund its national clean cooking transition dozens of times over. Yet in most African countries, modern cooking remains almost entirely dependent on external financing. National plans—from Ethiopia’s 35 million “improved stoves” to Kenya’s universal LPG goal—declare targets, but the domestic budgets to deliver them are absent or token.
A budget is more than a line item; it is a statement of political priority. It is the mechanism that allows parliaments to debate, media to scrutinize, and citizens to demand accountability. Its absence is why clean cooking remains a perpetual pilot project: present in plans, absent in practice.
Donors must reinforce—not replace—this commitment. Matching arrangements should be structured so that external finance flows only when governments commit their own resources. If a government earmarks USD 100 million for clean cooking delivery, donors can double or triple that amount through results-based financing. If a government fails to defend a budget line, external funding should taper. This disciplines both sides: governments must put real money on the table, while donors reward commitments, not declarations.
Ultimately, a budget is the bridge between orphanhood and accountability. It is the first, non-negotiable test of whether Africa’s leaders are serious about governing what politics ignores. Most importantly, this money must not vanish into diffuse ministries. Instead, it should be channeled into a dedicated, operational delivery unit. Such a unit should have authority over staffing, procurement, and field operations, paired with accountability for outcomes. Without this protection, money will be lost to procurement bottlenecks, endless consultations, and competing mandates. With it, budgets can finally anchor a system designed to deliver results under pressure.
Adaptive Institutions: The Harder Test
But a budget alone is not enough. Money must be spent effectively. The history of development is littered with well-funded failures. Clean cooking collapses not because money is absent, but because the systems to spend it are brittle: distribution is mistaken for delivery; monitoring counts devices, not use; and failures surface too late, with no authority empowered to act.
The deeper solution is adaptive institutions—structures designed to deliver in domains that are politically invisible, cross-cutting, and behaviorally complex. Unlike a road or a dam, clean cooking’s success depends on millions of daily household choices. It requires not a one-time spend, but a system that learns.
Effective adaptive institutions share four essential features. First, they must have political prioritization above the veto line, anchored at the highest level—in a President’s or Prime Minister’s Office—so that coordination challenges between ministries such as Energy, Health, and Environment do not morph into veto points that quietly stall progress. Second, they require operational autonomy with clear accountability: implementing units need direct control over staffing, procurement, and field operations, while being held to strict outcome obligations such as sustained use rates, reductions in PM2.5 levels, verified time savings for women, and the displacement of dirty fuels. Autonomy without accountability wastes money, just as accountability without autonomy paralyzes action.
Third, they must operate with a narrow, focused mandate. Attempting to solve everything everywhere ensures failure; instead, early efforts should target specific geographies or user segments—such as urban LPG adoption or rural biogas corridors—where iteration is feasible, results are visible, and lessons can be scaled.
Finally, they must embed real-time feedback. Monitoring cannot be relegated to outsourced annual evaluations; it must be continuous, internal, and supported by digital tools and field agents who can detect stove abandonment, breakage, or fuel-stacking within weeks rather than years, and trigger immediate fixes in design, training, or supply chains.
This is not a theoretical wish list. Africa has seen this model work in domains leaders genuinely prioritized. Ethiopia’s Telebirr mobile money platform succeeded because it was insulated from bureaucratic drag, iterated rapidly, and had direct executive backing. Similar delivery units have driven success in e-procurement and public financial management.
The bitter irony is that clean cooking has never been treated with the same seriousness. The lesson, however, is clear: if leaders can build institutions that deliver digital currency, they can build institutions that deliver clean air.
The final step is to create political payoffs for this unglamorous work. This can be achieved in three ways. Clean cooking outcomes can be integrated into flagship agendas leaders already value, whether reforestation targets, SME job creation from local manufacturing, or reductions in maternal mortality. Climate finance can also be leveraged, making defended domestic budget lines and delivery units a condition for accessing large-scale climate or carbon funding—transforming invisible governance reforms into gateways to external resources. And finally, dividends must be publicly attributed, with reductions in women’s time poverty and child pneumonia cases credited to the leaders who championed these delivery units. With this architecture, budgets convert into delivery. Without it, they remain merely a more expensive way to fail.
Conclusion: Africa’s Clean Cooking Test
When the doors of the Addis Ababa International Convention Center close on ACS-2, the headlines will tout new pledges for renewables, carbon markets, and adaptation finance. But the summit’s true legacy will be determined not in these negotiating rooms, but in the kitchens of Addis Ababa, Nairobi, Lagos, and countless rural villages and urban neighborhoods. The credibility of every continental commitment hinges on a simple, brutal question: can African governments build institutions that deliver what politics ignores?
Clean cooking is that test. It is a microcosm of the entire climate challenge: it is complex, cross-cutting, and essential, yet it offers no ribbon-cuttings or political prestige. The cost of failure is already quantified—a burden of hundreds of billions of dollars annually in health, productivity, and environmental damage across the continent, a price tag that dwarfs the climate finance being debated at the summit. The solution, as Fatih Birol has argued, requires no technological miracle, only political will.
That will must now be translated into two decisive actions:
First, defended budgets. Governments must declare clear, visible, and sustained national budget lines for clean cooking. These are not mere accounting entries but the foundational act of political prioritization, enabling scrutiny and accountability. Donors must then adopt a matching principle: rewarding domestic commitment with scaled, results-based finance, and withdrawing support where it is absent.
Second, adaptive institutions. Money alone is wasted without machinery to spend it effectively. Governments must establish delivery units—insulated from bureaucratic sabotage, empowered with operational autonomy, and obsessed with real-world feedback. These units must be tasked not with distributing gadgets, but with driving adoption, measuring sustained use, and adapting relentlessly to on-the-ground reality.
As Ethiopia hosts this gathering of leaders, its own kitchen crisis presents a moment of stark irony and opportunity. The nation that gave the world the green legacy of tree-planting can now pioneer a new legacy: of governance that works where it is hardest and least visible.
The agenda for ACS-2 is filled with talk of “Africa-led solutions” and “resilient pathways.” But no pathway is resilient if it is built on the smoke of a billion daily fires. No solution is truly African if it abandons women and children to a fate of preventable disease and stolen time.
The summit will be deemed a success not if it secures billions in promises, but if it triggers billions in investment—of finance, yes, but more importantly, of political capital—in the institutions that can finally turn the tide. The world is watching to see if Africa will lead. The first place to look will be its kitchens. And all of Addis is waiting to smell it.
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
