Clean cooking and human development

For about a third of humanity, the first act of the day is lighting a fire indoors. Wood, charcoal, dung, crop waste and kerosene are the everyday fuels of roughly 2.1 billion people, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and developing Asia. Nobody chose this as a development strategy. It is simply what is left when electricity, gas and reliable markets have not arrived.

The result is a quiet crisis that rarely makes headlines. Cooking energy is where health, gender, climate and income meet in a single household, every day.

How a stove shapes a life

Health. Burning solid fuel in a poorly ventilated home releases fine particles and carbon monoxide at levels far above safe limits. The World Health Organization links household air pollution to millions of deaths each year from pneumonia, stroke, heart disease, chronic lung disease and cancer, including hundreds of thousands of children under five. Smoke exposure in pregnancy is also linked to low birth weight.

Time and gender. In most households, cooking and fuel collection fall to women and girls. Gathering wood can take hours each day, and it can mean long walks that carry their own risks. Time spent on fuel is time not spent in school, in paid work or on a business. A cleaner, faster way of cooking returns those hours to the people who lose them.

Climate and environment. Harvesting wood unsustainably contributes to forest loss in some regions, and incomplete combustion releases black carbon, a short-lived pollutant that warms the climate. Clean cooking therefore pays off twice: it protects lungs and eases pressure on ecosystems.

Income. Poor households often spend a large share of their money or labour on fuel. Cleaner options can cost more up front but less over time, which is why financing the first purchase matters.

What works, and what doesn’t

Early efforts focused on handing out improved biomass stoves. Many cut smoke only modestly, and the health gains were smaller than hoped. More recent evidence, including large trials of LPG stoves, shows an important pattern: benefits depend on households using the clean stove exclusively. Many families practise “fuel stacking”, keeping the old stove for some meals, which means exposure stays high. A clean stove in the kitchen is not the same as a clean kitchen.

Switching happens when the new option is affordable, available and convenient every day. That makes the choice of fuel a question of local context.

Option	Strength	Main barrier
LPG	Convenient, widely proven	Cost of refills, supply in rural areas
Electric (induction, pressure cookers)	Cleanest at home, no refills	Reliable, affordable power
Biogas	Uses farm waste, cheap to run	Needs livestock and upfront cost
Ethanol	Clean, can be locally made	Limited supply and stove choice
Advanced biomass	Works where others do not reach	Variable performance, needs quality fuel

Electric cooking deserves particular attention. Efficient appliances such as induction hobs and electric pressure cookers use surprisingly little electricity, and they can run on solar power, mini-grids or the main network. Early pilots in parts of Africa and South Asia suggest that households will adopt them when power is reliable and the appliances are affordable, and that they often keep using them. As electricity access grows and clean power becomes cheaper, electric cooking could become the simplest route for many households. In remote places where the grid will not arrive soon, LPG, biogas and ethanol are likely to remain the practical choices for years.

India and Indonesia show the scale that is possible. Indonesia moved tens of millions of households from kerosene to LPG in a few years through a conversion programme. India’s Ujjwala scheme has connected well over 100 million households to LPG, though early evidence showed that many did not refill their cylinders regularly until subsidies and support addressed refill costs. Both cases show that making the fuel affordable to keep buying matters as much as the initial connection.

A clean stove in the kitchen is not the same as a clean kitchen. What matters is whether families keep using it.

A resilience issue, too

Cooking fuel is also a question of how well households withstand shocks. A family that depends on purchased charcoal or kerosene is exposed whenever prices spike, as they did after the 2022 energy crisis, when many households were pushed back towards wood and other polluting fuels because cleaner options had become too expensive. Families without a clean fallback have little room to absorb a price rise, a lost harvest or an illness.

The reverse is also true. A household with a reliable clean cooking option, ideally one that can run on more than one fuel, is better protected against disruption. It spends less on fuel, loses less time and avoids the health costs of smoke, which leaves more capacity to cope with the next shock. In the language of the polycrisis, the stove is one of the many small couplings through which global energy shocks reach the poorest homes.

This is why the people who still cook with smoke are not just a gap in an energy statistic. They are among those most exposed to every other crisis, and the cheapest to protect.

What it implies

Clean cooking has long been underfunded relative to its returns. The IEA estimates that universal access by 2030 would need roughly $8 billion a year, a modest figure next to the health, time and climate benefits. Momentum is building: the 2024 Clean Cooking Summit in Paris secured pledges of more than $2 billion.

The case does not rest on health alone. Cleaner kitchens mean fewer days lost to illness, more time for school and work, and a smaller burden on health systems that are already stretched. Few investments of comparable size deliver gains across so many areas at once.

Three priorities follow. First, treat cooking as part of the energy system, not as a side issue. Expanding electricity, as discussed in clean energy in emerging economies, opens the door to electric cooking. Second, finance the switch for poor households, through results-based payments, pay-as-you-go models and support for refills. Third, measure what matters: the share of families that have stopped using polluting fuels, not simply the number of stoves handed out.

The kitchen is where energy policy becomes personal. Getting it right improves health, frees time, protects the climate and strengthens a household’s resilience to the next shock. It is among the best-value investments in human development that remain unfinished.