Virtual Knowledge Exchange | The Hidden Side of Energy Access: Understanding Clean Cooking

Access to clean cooking solutions, including modern stoves and cooking fuels, is often overlooked as part of the wider energy access agenda. This is surprising, given that four billion people – over half the world’s population – lack access to modern energy cooking service, also known as MECS, for their daily cooking practices. This means that families around the world continue to rely on fuels like woodfuel or charcoal and rudimentary stoves, leading to devastating health, climate, environmental and gender impacts that cost the world an estimated 2.4 trillion dollars each year. While the imperatives are clear, attention and focus on clean cooking have not been commensurate.

To address this gap, the World Bank’s Open Learning Campus (OLC) and the Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP) partnered in a virtual Knowledge Exchange (KE) that built on the recently launched, first-of-its-kind self-paced e-learning course.

This course can be taken on an on-going basis through the Open Learning Campus (OLC) site.