Across Africa, thousands of schools, hospitals and prisons still rely on firewood and charcoal for cooking. This traditional approach carries enormous costs, from rising firewood bills and environmental degradation to unsafe working environments.
In Kenya alone, more than 20,000 schools depend on firewood. According to Nature Kenya, a single school with 400 students consumes about 168 tonnes of firewood annually, equivalent to 56 acres of forest productivity. When multiplied across the education system, this translates to more than 3.3 million tonnes of firewood every year, threatening approximately 1.1 million acres of forest.
This unsustainable trend undermines Kenya’s goal of achieving 21 per cent tree cover by 2027 and 30 per cent by 2032. It also places enormous pressure on school budgets and exposes cooks and students to harmful smoke. The transition to clean cooking is not simply about modernising kitchens. It is a critical step toward protecting forests, improving health and supporting national climate goals.
Recognising this, President William Ruto has made clean cooking a national priority, committing Kenya to universal access by 2028. If implemented, this will be the largest clean cooking transition in Africa’s history.
As COP30 approaches in Belém, Brazil, in November 2025, with its focus on accelerating climate finance, nature-based solutions, and ambitious Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement, Kenya's institutional clean cooking transition emerges as a prime opportunity to align national infrastructure with global climate imperatives.
Achieving this goal requires a shift in how clean cooking is viewed and delivered. It cannot be treated as a collection of stoves or gadgets sold one by one. It must be planned, financed and delivered as infrastructure, just like power grids and telecommunications networks.
Kenya’s telecommunications revolution provides a powerful example of what can happen when an essential service is treated as infrastructure. In 2000, there were fewer than two mobile subscriptions for every 100 people. By 2020, that number had grown to more than 115 per 100 people. This growth was not driven by the sale of handsets but by financing telecom towers, networks and backbone systems as national infrastructure.
The government created an enabling policy environment, investors financed networks, and private innovators built services like M-Pesa on top of this backbone. The result was near-universal access within two decades.
A similar story played out in the electricity sector. Access to electricity in Kenya grew from 15 per cent in 2000 to nearly 70 per cent in 2020 because power was financed and built as infrastructure. The government invested in generation, transmission and distribution systems, while independent power producers plugged into this backbone. Citizens did not have to buy generators; they simply connected to the grid.
Institutional kitchens in schools, hospitals and prisons have the same potential. They require significant capital investment, provide essential services and have long operational lifespans. Like telecom towers and power grids, they can anchor large-scale investment.
A single school might seem risky to finance, but bundling hundreds or thousands of schools into one portfolio creates scale and attracts private capital. This is exactly how telecom operators and mini-grid developers de-risked their investments.
School feeding programmes create predictable daily demand, making these projects bankable in the same way industrial anchors support mini-grids. Telecom and electricity scaled because they blended public guarantees, concessional finance and private investment. For clean cooking, carbon revenues, results-based financing and local banking products can achieve similar outcomes.
That said, it is imperative to note that policy alignment is essential. Telecom grew through spectrum policies, and electricity expanded through electrification strategies. Clean cooking must be fully integrated into Kenya’s National Cooking Transition Strategy for 2024 to 2028 and linked to climate, forest and education goals.
Just as telecom and power systems offer service guarantees, institutional clean cooking systems must come with service agreements and reliability commitments so that schools can trust that meals will always be cooked on time.
The environmental and economic benefits of shifting institutional cooking from firewood to modern energy are significant. It reduces deforestation and saves millions of tonnes of wood every year, protecting over a million acres of forest. It eliminates smoke exposure for cooks and students, improving health outcomes.
Dennis Nderitu is the Managing Director of Ignis Innovation and Jon Leary is the Co-Founder & Co-Director of Gamos East Africa
