REPORT LAUNCH: Unlocking Clean Cooking Pathways | A Practitioner's Keys to Progress | March 15 | 8:15-9:15am EDT

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Clean cooking is an essential component to achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 7.1 – ensuring universal access to affordable, reliable, and modern energy services. However, the stark reality is that progress on clean cooking access has been stymied by past perceptions of the sector as orphaned, invisible, and expensive. As of 2020, 2.4 billion people were still living in cooking poverty, compared to 733 million without access to electricity. The review of SDG7 at the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF), the SDG Summit, the Climate Ambition Summit, and COP28 will be important opportunities to strengthen the high-level political commitment and stakeholder action required to tackle the issue, including large-scale public investment to crowd in private investment; and knowledge and innovation to lower the costs of interventions. 

This joint session was co-hosted by the World Bank’s Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP) and United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA), prior to the SDG7 Technical Advisory Group (TAG) meeting.

This session presented the key findings from ESMAP’s new report Unlocking Clean Cooking Pathways: A Practitioner’s Keys to Progress, which aims to equip project task teams, development partners, policy makers, implementing agency staff, and practitioners with the knowledge and tools required to drive country progress on clean cooking adoption, drawing mainly on the experience and lessons learned from the World Bank’s operational projects in the sector. The session was also joined by representatives from donors, client countries, and development partners to share insights on how this report can be leveraged by practitioners as a useful resource for moving the needle forward on clean cooking access for all.