Mission 300 & clean cooking: Delivering energy access, gender justice and health at scale
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Article summary
Nots from the Civil Society Policy Forum on 14 April, titled Mission 300 & clean cooking: Delivering energy access, gender justice and health at scale. As Mission 300 expands energy access across Africa, clean cooking remains critically under-prioritised. This session explored how national energy compacts can deliver affordable, accessible cooking solutions at scale through financing models, policy alignment, and accountability mechanisms. It interrogated how “clean cooking” is defined and positions civil society as essential to transformative outcomes.
Moderator
- Catherine Vowles, Campaign Assistant, The Big Shift Global
Panellists
- Karabo Mokgonyana, Campaigns and Energy Advisor, Power Shift Africa
- Rajneesh Bhuee, Just Transition Lead, Recourse
- Johanna Christine Galan, Mission 300 Coordinator and Senior Energy Specialist, WBG
- Yabei Zhang, Senior Energy Specialist, WBG
- Dean Bhekumuzi Bhebhe, Director, Africa Change Lab
A recording of the session can be found here.
Organisers: Recourse, Big Shift Global, Power Shift Africa, Africa Change Lab, HakiRasilimali, Africa Finance Watch
Catherine: Mission 300 is an initiative between the World Bank and the African Development Bank, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, and Sustainable Energy for All. It has the goal of connecting 300 million people in Africa to energy by 2030, with the World Bank committing individually to 250 million.
Today we put a spotlight on clean cooking. As Mission 300 powers ahead, clean cooking remains one of its most critical yet underprioritized pillars. So let’s look at the figures. Since the launch in July 2023, 43 million people have been connected to electricity by the World Bank Group, and 5 million more by the African Development Bank. Since the 2024 Paris Summit on Clean Cooking in Africa, $2.2 billion has been mobilised by the World Bank Group, and the African Development Bank has pledged $2 billion over 10 years.
In terms of commitments, 30 countries have joined so far, with 30 national compacts launched, all including clean cooking alongside electrification. But 1 billion Africans still lack access to clean cooking, and this number grows by 14 million each year.
So the question for today is: how do we turn commitments into real transformation?
Karabo: At PowerShift Africa, with our partners, we are launching Clean Cooking in Sub-Saharan Africa – a report that breaks down what clean cooking is, so we can have a more grounded discussion before getting into energy choices or financing.
It outlines the tiers from zero to five, and the landscape of roughly 960 million people lacking access, alongside the continued reliance on charcoal, firewood and kerosene. It also highlights the disproportionate impacts on women and children, who are most often responsible for cooking. The report touches on key risks – health impacts like household air pollution and disease, time poverty limiting education and economic opportunities, and economic pressures like rising fuel costs, price volatility, and strain on household incomes and national import bills. On investment, much sits in the commercial space, but affordability and access – especially in remote areas – remain major challenges, with a significant burden still on consumers.
Let me close by saying this conversation is personal. It’s lived, experienced across generations, and something I’ve seen up close in our communities.
Catherine: Dr. Zhang, can you walk us through how the World Bank defines clean cooking within Mission 300, what fuels and technologies are included in that definition, and how that definition was determined?
Johanna: As you know, Mission 300 is about providing electricity access to 300 million people across Sub-Saharan Africa. And while our main KPI is electricity access, from the outset it’s been very clear we need to look at energy access holistically – and that includes clean cooking. So what we’ve done is ensure that in all energy compacts, clean cooking is an absolute part – it’s a cornerstone of each compact. And I was about to say this before, but it’s important: the governments really own the compacts. And that matters, because it signals a renewed commitment from governments, reflected in the fact that all of them included clean cooking, with clear targets and actions.
Where we come in is mainly on the financing side, and we are increasingly mainstreaming clean cooking into our energy access portfolio. For example, ASCENT – our flagship program for Eastern and Southern Africa – is targeting 100 million people for electricity access and another 20 million for clean cooking solutions across 20 countries.
Yabei: At WBG, we take a performance-based, technology-neutral approach. Why? Because clean cooking is highly contextual = it depends on culture, cuisine, and what is locally available. We do not prescribe specific technologies or stoves. Instead, we build incentives for the private sector to deliver contextual solutions and encourage innovation. But when we implement projects, we do have performance-based criteria aligned with ISO voluntary performance targets, themselves based on World Health Organisation air quality guidelines.
The definition is based on emissions from the device and fuel, focusing on two key parameters: particulate matter 2.5 and carbon monoxide. Only tier 4 and tier 5 solutions that meet those thresholds are considered “clean”. In practice, that often includes electric cooking, biogas, natural gas, LPG and ethanol – looking at it from an end-user emissions perspective and health impact. But alongside this strict definition, there are also transitional solutions, which are very relevant in the African context. In low-income households, or where infrastructure is constrained, using traditional biomass or processed biomass with improved cookstoves can reduce emissions and fuel use significantly. These are considered transitional solutions.
So we often see tier 3, and in some cases tier 2. Tier 0 and tier 1 like the traditional three-stone open fire – are the most inefficient and polluting, and unfortunately still widely used in many African households today.
Catherine: Now a question to Raj: there is a crucial question about what gets financed as clean cooking, and as was just highlighted, this can range from electric to biogas to LPG. So what principles should guide these choices to ensure climate, health, and affordability goals all align?
Rajneesh: Right now, definitions of clean cooking – across the World Bank and the International Energy Agency – include LPG, biogas, ethanol, and other solutions. In fact, the IEA projects that around 45 per cent of clean cooking access will come from LPG.
But then the question we keep asking is: LPG and LNG still lock countries into fossil fuels for decades. We call it a “transition solution”, but is there actually a timeline for when this stops? Mission 300 runs to 2030 – so in the next three years, are we really able to finance and deliver access at the speed required? And yes, LPG is cleaner than charcoal, but it is not zero-emission. It also creates import dependency and is exposed to price volatility that hits poor households hardest.
So the principles here, I would say, are civil society-led and grounded in lived realities.
First, health first. Even if LPG is “better than charcoal”, we need to ask: does it actually meet WHO air quality guidelines? Does it meaningfully improve air quality and reduce long-term respiratory impacts?
Second, climate alignment. If we are serious about 1.5°C and Paris alignment, then we need to be careful about building fossil fuel cooking lock-in, even under a “transition” framing. There has to be a clear phase-out logic.
Third, economic sustainability. Renewable options like electric cooking, biogas and biomass systems can build local value chains and jobs. And if the World Bank’s North Star is jobs, then these systems matter for livelihoods as well as energy.
And fourth, gender and affordability. Because ultimately, access on paper is not access in reality. Can households afford it daily? Women need solutions they can own and afford – not systems imposed without feasibility in daily life.
Karabo: Adding to Raj, then there is the geopolitical layer. The African continent is extremely vulnerable in the current energy system. Global energy market shocks have already hit our countries hard, and that speaks to how exposed we are as net importers of energy. We import gas, oil and more, and when global shifts happen – whether in the Middle East or elsewhere – we feel it directly. Governments end up spending heavily on subsidies just to stabilise things. Even when markets shift again, we are still carrying the cost. So the vulnerability is structural.
By contrast, renewable-based solutions don’t lock us into that import dependency – we may import technology, but not the fuel itself. So we also need to choose solutions based on that reality: vulnerability, cost and long-term stability. And even on cost – LPG is often presented as cheap or transitional, but in reality it is not aligned with least-cost pathways once you factor in subsidies, volatility and import dependence.
Africa has plentiful RE capacity. So why are we not leapfrogging? Why are we not just using that potential and deploying the technologies that match it?
Catherine: Question to Dean, when it comes to funding clean cooking, what finance innovations are showing promise, and what is working beyond traditional models?
Dean: First, we need to stop treating clean cooking like traditional infrastructure. It behaves more like a distributed consumer transition problem. So the shift is: are we financing supply, or are we financing adoption? What’s working is borrowing from telecoms and mobile money. The real breakthrough there wasn’t infrastructure alone – it was prepaid, pay-as-you-go models. And we’re seeing that same logic emerge in clean cooking: households paying in small, predictable increments. So the key idea is: we finance cash flow, not large upfront capital costs.
Second, public finance should be used to buy down risk, not build assets. The main barriers are perceived risk and affordability. So public funding should de-risk last-mile distributors, help guarantee demand, and reward sustained usage – not just initial connections. We need functioning markets, not just pilot projects.
Third, we’re moving toward blended affordability finance. Households cannot absorb high upfront costs, so the structure becomes: small entry subsidies, conditional support to get started, and then private capital scaling distribution. Public and private finance are layered depending on risk and affordability.
We also need to recognise that clean cooking delivers major co-benefits – health improvements, carbon reductions and productivity gains. But the problem is those benefits are public, while the costs are private. When that mismatch exists, adoption naturally stalls. So this is where results-based financing and structured payment schemes become important – they align incentives more effectively.
And finally, the key point: without properly involving the private sector and designing for affordability and risk, we will continue to stall. The opportunity is to unlock clean cooking through the right mix of blended finance, risk-sharing, and demand-driven models that actually make the market work.
Catherine: World Bank representatives, unlocking clean cooking in Africa – looking across 30 compacts, what models are showing early promise?
Johanna: Across the 30 compacts that have been launched, governments are committed to connect more than 500 million people to clean cooking solutions. And that’s just from 30 compacts – we still have 10 more coming at the end of June, so that number will increase further.
If you look at the commitments inside those compacts, more than half of governments have committed to adopting a national clean cooking strategy. And not only that – they’ve made it a top priority reform. We asked governments to list their top 10 reforms, and 16 of them included clean cooking in that top 10. So it’s not just included, it’s prioritised. We also see a strong focus on affordability. And I agree, that is a key constraint. Ten governments have committed to fiscal measures – reducing VAT or import duties on clean cooking technologies – to bring down consumer costs, which can make a real difference.
Another important area is financing models. Several governments are introducing results-based financing or similar schemes to enable private sector delivery of clean cooking solutions – but with a pro-poor focus, ensuring these schemes actually close the affordability and viability gap.
So when you ask what is working, the early signal is clear: strong country ownership is the biggest predictor of success. In Madagascar, for example, a national clean cooking policy and strategy was adopted early, and that has already unlocked investment – such as a $35 million clean cooking project funded by OFID, alongside support from ASCENT at scale.
Yabei: There are three pillars we focus on when designing and implementing World Bank projects with governments. First is policy reform, through energy compacts and ongoing energy dialogues. Second is dedicated financing. And third is knowledge and innovation. These three need to reinforce each other. On the earlier question about LPG or not LPG – our view is that this is highly contextual. There is a trade-off between perfection and action. If we wait for the perfect solution, people will continue to suffer for another 10, 20, even 30 years.
That is why, a few years ago, the World Bank and WHO developed a long-term roadmap toward net zero clean cooking. The pathway is phased: by 2030, the focus is universal access; from 2030 to 2040, decarbonising cooking; and by 2050, universal access to zero-emission solutions.
So the idea is not to make the perfect the enemy of the good.
And every country starts from a different point – different affordability levels, different energy endowments, different government capacity. That’s why we also developed planning tools, including the Clean Cooking Planning Tool and the Multi-Tier Framework survey, which allow countries to model pathways – electric cooking, LPG, biomass, biogas, ethanol – and understand costs, benefits and trade-offs.
They also show the “cost of inaction” – health costs, gender impacts and environmental damage – alongside investment needs.
And ultimately, the goal is to use limited public finance to catalyse private investment, using the right mix of instruments – grants, results-based financing, guarantees, de-risking tools and carbon finance.
Catherine: So my next question is for Karabo: from a community experience across Africa and your own lived experience, what does successful clean cooking implementation actually look like on the ground? And second, for women who bear the greatest burden of harmful cooking fuels but are often left out of decision-making, how can compacts ensure women’s voices genuinely shape clean cooking strategies – and how do different fuel choices impact women and girls differently?
Karabo: In terms of examples, there are a few across the continent, but I’ll speak to one from South Africa. The approach there was strongly economic: the creation of community cooperatives and the use of women-owned and women-led SMMEs as key drivers of implementation. And I mention this because, within Mission 300-type work, women SMMEs should be prioritised in procurement and bidding processes. They are often marginalised or excluded because they are seen as not having the scale that large financiers expect. But from an effectiveness point of view, women-owned and women-led SMMEs, along with community cooperatives, should absolutely be considered core implementers.
In this case, the pilot focused on solar stoves – testing whether they actually work in communities where cooking intensity is high, but also how you build an entire system around them. Because it’s not just about distributing stoves and giving basic training. You need an ecosystem: maintenance systems, technical support, affordability mechanisms, and even market creation. And importantly, these women-led SMMEs didn’t just exist within communities – they helped build distribution chains and maintenance networks around the technology itself.
So the lesson is: clean cooking cannot just be a product rollout. It has to be a system approach. Otherwise you end up with the same issue – stoves break, and there is no one to repair them, no service model, and no sustainability. So this becomes not only a cooking intervention, but a development and economic one – creating income and livelihoods for women within these systems.
And this is important because we often say “bring women into decision-making spaces,” but economic structures often determine how systems actually function. So yes, women must be in governance and compact implementation decisions – but we must also deliberately choose women developers, women SMEs, and women cooperatives as implementers.
Another key success factor we saw in this programme is male allyship. This is not a “women issue.” Clean cooking affects everyone – yes, disproportionately women and young women, but it is a universal issue because everyone eats. So we also need men in decision-making spaces – ministries of finance, private sector, investment committees – to actively consider the gendered impacts of energy choices.
Catherine: My next question goes to Raj: talking about inclusion in this conversation, how does accountability look in this context? How can civil society effectively monitor whether compact commitments on clean cooking translate into real household-level change?
Rajneesh: There is still a massive gap between what is written in the compacts and what actually reaches households. So what we need to monitor is “true access.” Not just the 43 million headline figure, but whether we can actually corroborate those stories on the ground. Can someone say, “I got clean cooking access because of Mission 300”? Those lived stories matter.
Civil society already plays a role through multi-stakeholder engagement, and this kind of dialogue is important. Second, we need disaggregated data. And building on Karabo’s point, this is not just about gender as a category, but about systems. We should track where money is going – LPG infrastructure versus renewables, biogas, electric cooking – and analyse cost-benefit and health outcomes properly. We also need to go deeper into implementation data: how much is going to different technologies, and what that means on the ground.
Then there is community-level monitoring. It should not only be institutions tracking progress. We need households themselves to be able to confirm access. We also need openness around the Compact Delivery and Monitoring Units. Civil society should have access to these structures. Right now, in many contexts, it’s not even clear where or how to engage them. That needs to change so there is real interaction between governments, implementation teams and civil society.
Finally, annual progress reports should include clean cooking alongside electricity, with proper household survey data. And not only that – those working on the ground should also be able to feed in real-time tracking. And if we are talking about knowledge and innovation as a pillar, then we also need knowledge access. Not just trackers like the Mission 300 dashboard, but transparency on what projects are financed, how much money has gone to countries, and how it is being used.
Catherine: As Raj was talking about this gap that exists between the national compact commitments and what reaches households, as well as how people are able to participate in this process and gain access to what’s actually happening in their countries that is affecting them – how do we bridge this gap?
Yabei: Yes, so for World Bank projects, I mean that’s not 100 per cent right – every project, we have an access to information policy. Basically all our project design, procurement, and progress reports are available under that. But more importantly, we also have monitoring and evaluation, grievance redress mechanisms, and particularly for cooking, we are increasingly using results-based financing, as Dean also mentioned.
Johanna: Maybe just one thing on civil society – because I think it is important to keep governments accountable. You have commitments in the compacts, and we really want to see those becoming reality. We will be launching public compact reporting in June during the Africa Energy Forum, so you will all get a sense of where governments actually stand in implementation. And that’s a really important tool to engage governments in dialogue – where progress is happening, where we are lagging, and what needs to improve.
And on women’s integration, I think it is really important. All our projects are gender tagged, meaning we explicitly design them to identify and close gender gaps. So if you ever see something where you feel the World Bank could do more, please tell us – the teams are always open to feedback.
And I also want to add: women are not only users – we track that, including female-headed households – but also on the supplier side. We include indicators for women-led businesses and female employment.
Catherine: Dean, how do we build local supply chains and create jobs through clean cooking transitions at scale, rather than just importing solutions?
Dean: What we need to look at is this: if we import clean cooking solutions, we solve the system temporarily. But if we build local value chains, we solve the economy. So we need to shift from product distribution to ecosystem development. And we start with the missing middle: distribution services. Jobs are not only in manufacturing, but also in renewable energy networks, maintenance, logistics and last-mile delivery. That is where the biggest employment potential lies. So the clean cooking economy is really a service economy, not just a manufacturing one.
We also need to build fuel markets, not just stove markets. Because adoption fails when fuel is unreliable or expensive. So countries should focus on domestic fuels where viable – like biofuels and electricity – alongside stable supply chains and predictable pricing. That reduces import dependency, and also reduces currency volatility and foreign exchange pressure.
We also need to treat clean cooking as an industrial policy entry point: local assembly, local manufacturing, and innovation ecosystems that connect into agriculture, SMEs, and women-led enterprises. Because clean cooking is one of the fastest ways to turn energy access into jobs.
But we also need to anchor ownership locally. If value chains are externally owned, profits leak out. If locally anchored, we get reinvestment, job creation and capacity building. And ultimately, this is about building systems that are locally managed, economically productive, and capable of scaling development impact across the continent while addressing the clean cooking challenge.
Questions and answers
Louisa from WaterAid: With “Water Forward” launching tomorrow, and inspired by Mission 300, I wanted to ask what indicators exist to track the hardest to reach. Because quantitative targets create incentives for scalable solutions, especially with the tight timeline to 2030. So how do you ensure the hardest to reach are prioritised and truly transformational?
Bridget Mitchell from Team Price: what has been the experience of the Clean Cooking Outcome Bond and its ability to monetise carbon credits as the variable part of the coupon?
Patrick from African Green Transition Fund: on results-based financing – has it been applied to non-private actors, like governments or World Bank teams themselves? For example, bonus schemes, incentives, or performance-linked rewards?
Johanna: Quite frankly, the mission that we put forward, 300 million people, you can’t just focus on the low-hanging fruit. You have to go to the hardest to reach. You have to go to the rural areas. And on the electricity side, we said 50 per cent of the connections will come through distributed renewable solutions, because we know we need to go into rural areas and grid extension is just not a viable way to do that. And the results-based financing that we’re doing is always part of a pro-poor element. It’s not only about moving the private sector deeper into difficult-to-reach areas, but also what we need to do on the demand side to really make sure products actually become affordable. And then rewarding our teams and project implementation units and governments to move faster.
Maybe I can add on incentives: it always requires more incentives for people to go the extra mile to reach poorer households. Recently, the World Bank’s proposal to the GCF, called Ascend Green, is precisely trying to focus on vulnerable populations, climate vulnerable populations in particular, using distributed renewable energy and cooking solutions and product reuse. And GCF is providing more concessional financing. It was approved end of March by the GCF Board – $250 million GCF financing for the World Bank ASCENT program. We’re still working on the legal agreement, but we are very excited to launch later this year. It will cover 21 countries in East and Southern Africa.
We have done consultations in all countries, including five financing facilities that complement each other:
- Debt financing.
- Results-based financing (majority funding, giving incentives to reach harder-to-reach populations.
- Equity financing working with IFC (supporting companies delivering DRE solutions)
- De-risking / risk-sharing facilities to bring local financial institutions closer to cooking and DRE companies.
- Carbon risk mitigation facility to provide a floor price for carbon and stabilise revenue.
This links to a cluster around the clean cooking carbon component. There is also a new instrument structured by our Treasury to provide financing to a company, I think called UpEnergy in Ghana, pooled last December, still in progress. The idea is that if you achieve results, then coupon payments are linked to results, supporting advanced financing.
So again, this space requires continued innovation. From the Bank side, we continue to try different instruments, continue to learn, and work with partners and civil society organizations to tackle this issue.
