What the fire does
About 2.1 billion people, a quarter of everyone alive, cook on open fires or inefficient stoves burning wood, charcoal, crop waste, dung, coal or kerosene. The World Health Organization attributes 2.9 million premature deaths a year to the smoke that produces indoors, including more than 309,000 children under 5. It is not mainly a lung story. Heart disease accounts for 32% of those deaths and stroke another 23%, ahead of respiratory infection at 21%.
Women and children take most of it, because they do the cooking and the fuel gathering. A household without a clean stove spends about 4 hours a day collecting fuel and cooking over it. One caution on the headline number. The health agency says 2.9 million, the International Energy Agency says 2.5 million in one report and 3.7 million in another. They are counting differently and this article uses the health agency figure and names it rather than splitting the difference.
What a meal costs on electricity, charcoal and LPG
An electric pressure cooker costs less per meal than charcoal or LPG, which contradicts the common assumption that electricity is too expensive to cook with. A research programme funded by UK Aid set out to test that, pooling cooking trials from several countries in Africa and Asia. It found that cooking a typical meal in an electric pressure cooker costs about a third of what the same meal costs on LPG, and less than a fifth of what it costs on charcoal.
Ratios of energy, not of money, though the same paper finds the pressure cooker cheaper per meal than either. The paper is marked a working paper for comment.
Show the numbers
| Charcoal | 15 |
| LPG | 4 |
| Electric pressure cooker | 1 |
The reason is that a sealed, insulated pot wastes almost nothing. Charcoal uses 15 times the energy of an electric pressure cooker to make the same food. LPG uses 4 times. Against an ordinary electric hotplate, a modern induction hob saves about 10%, a rice cooker about 25%, and a pressure cooker about 50%. The appliance matters more than the fuel.
Access grew, and the gap grew
Access grew and the gap grew, in the same year. In 2025 the gain rose to 15 million, the highest on record.
Show the numbers
| Gained access | 12 |
| Added by population growth | 14 |
In 2024, 12 million people in Africa south of the Sahara gained access to clean cooking, triple the 4 million a year being reached in 2010. In the same year, population growth added 14 million people to the number without it. Both of those are true at once, and only 23% of the region had clean cooking at the end of it. In 2025 the figure improved to 15 million, the highest annual gain on record and 35% above the average of the previous 5 years.
The pace of clean cooking delivery in sub-Saharan Africa is now triple the rate seen in 2010.
Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency. Source 4.
The money pledged and paid
At a summit in 2024, governments and companies pledged 2.2 billion dollars. By the end of May 2026, 740 million had actually been paid out, across 30 countries, with Kenya taking 19% of it. Kenya is at 32% access and its president puts the cost of getting the rest of the country there at about 1 billion dollars by itself. Annual investment in clean cooking was 770 million dollars in 2024, up from 590 million in 2020.
Set that against the 1.2 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent that traditional cooking emits every year, and against 2.9 million deaths, and the sums involved are small. That is the unusual thing about this problem. It is not waiting on a technology.