Kenya - Country Climate and Development Report : Clean Cooking Sector Background Note (English)

This Background Note to the Kenya Country Climate and Development Report (CCDR) highlights the urgent need to scale access to clean cooking in order to reduce energy poverty and mitigate climate change. In Kenya, heavy household dependence on traditional, polluting cooking technologies and fuels (mainly firewood and charcoal) hinders progress toward meeting UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7 and closely related SDGs, especially for climate, gender, and health. In 2020, only 20 percent of Kenya’s overall population had access to clean cooking solutions, with just 5 percent access in rural areas. The vast majority of rural households still rely on charcoal-fueled, traditional woodstoves. Unsustainable wood-fuel harvesting and production methods, along with inefficient cooking practices, contribute to forest degradation, particularly in the country’s arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs), where most of the charcoal used is sourced. Successive government bans on charcoal have led to illegal cross-border trade, underscoring the need for the sector to take a climate adaptive approach-one that offers poor and vulnerable people access to diversified, climate-resilient cooking technologies and fuels and increases their capacity to withstand fuel-supply shocks.