Environmentally sustainable, affordable, reliable, and healthy cooking practices, in short “Clean Cooking” is not a given for many families around the world. In Africa alone millions of people do not have access to clean cooking options. And annually, millions of people, mostly women and children die from unsafe cooking practices and respiratory diseases because of indoor cooking. African forests are deforested at an unprecedented scale (between 2010-2020 on average 4 M ha of forest / year has vanished in Africa) and many families are suffering because of the high cooking costs.

Currently, 36% of global fuel wood is consumed in Africa (18% of total global wood consumption). With an expected tripling of Africa’s population in the next 2-3 decades the problems will only get worse.

There are several cooking solutions, biogas cookstoves, gasifier cookstoves with pellets, electric cooking, etc, that can help to solve the above problems. These solutions need to be introduced into the market and scaled-up.

With our focus on sustainable and profitable solutions that create as much positive impact as possible, Partners for Innovation is supporting the introduction and scale-up of the Clean Cooking solutions.

Our activities include:

• One of the limiting factors for scaling-up gasifier cookstoves in many regions is the absence of sustainable, affordable and good quality pellets. Partners for Inno0vation has therefor taken the initiative to develop and invest in Coega Biomass Centre, a pellet factory in Port Elizabeth in South Africa. The factory will produce 120.000 tonnes of certified and high-quality wood pellets. Production has started in March 2024. With this large-scale pellet factory being operational, we hope to be able to kick-start the gasifier cookstove market in Southern Africa.
• Together with Mimi Moto we started the initiative for a feasibility study in the Port Elizabeth region in South Africa to Identify the possibilities for local low-income households to use MimiMoto’s gasifier stoves and wood pellets for cooking.
• In December 2023, Partners for Innovation organised the Energy Compact Café “breaking barriers for clean cooking”. The meeting brought together Dutch organization’s active in the clean cooking sector with the aim to discuss the way forward and create new collaborations.

A selection of the projects we are or have been involved in:

• A world-first stove earns accolades and carbon credits  in Rwanda – the GET.invest Finance Catalyst advisors supported to access crucial blended finance (2024)
• Baseline study on clean cooking in Uganda, Malawi, Liberia and Niger in cooperation with Akvo (RVO; 2023-2024)
• Clean cooking pilots in refugee camps Ethiopia for Hivos, Dorcas and Zoa – Proposal for a market-based pilot project for clean cooking provision for refugees (RVO; 2019)
• Alternative biomass cooking fuels in Sub-Saharan Africa (2015) – Global survey of scalable business models for alternative biomass cooking fuels and their potential (WorldBank Group; 2015)

For more information, please contact Emiel Hanekamp or Manuela Rosada Henao.