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Access to clean cooking is one of the most persistent and universal grand challenges in the world today. An estimated 2.3 billion people lack access, and that number has been increasing in recent years. This challenge is often framed through a techno-economic lens, with efforts going toward cleaner fuels, better stoves, and stronger supply chains. While all of that matters, cooking is also shaped by the unequal burdens that women and girls carry every day, from fuel collection and smoke exposure to lost time, reduced opportunities, and limited influence over the decisions that affect their lives.
That is why clean cooking cannot be treated as a technical matter alone. It also sits squarely in the worlds of work, care, safety, income, and power. Any serious effort to expand access has to look not only at what people cook with, but also at who carries the heaviest costs when better options are missing, and who has a stake in the solutions that follow.
Women are still too often described mainly as end users of clean cooking solutions. In reality, they are also business owners, producers, retailers, technicians, organisers, and early adopters who help determine whether a product or service takes root. That broader role matters. Clean cooking looks different when women are not only expected to adopt a solution, but are also able to shape, supply, finance, and benefit from it.
The picture becomes more complex still once local realities come into focus. There is no single female experience of energy poverty. Poverty, geography, ethnicity, disability, displacement, and social norms all influence whether cleaner cooking is affordable, acceptable, available, or worth the risk of trying. Interventions that overlook those differences may still deliver stoves or fuels, but it is less likely to build lasting change.
What gender-responsive clean cooking looks like in practice
Clean cooking becomes more sustainable when it is embedded in gender-responsive approaches that strengthen local manufacturing, standards, and industries and markets, while enabling women to participate across value-chain. In this context, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) supports efforts that link clean cooking with entrepreneurship development, quality infrastructure, and inclusive industrial growth.
One example can be seen in Madagascar, in the work of Marie Louise Schmidt Rasoamanahirana, founder of Biogasikara Energy, who produces clean cooking fuels from agricultural and forestry waste while building local production capacity. Despite factory fire that set the company back, she rebuilt operations and is now preparing to launch locally produced wood pallets. Her company benefited from an incubation programme supported by UNIDO, and she also plays a leading role in the Madagascar Clean Cooking Initiative, where she brings together public institutions, producers, and partners, while expanding women's participation in the sector.
Energising Development (EnDev), a global partnership working on energy access for over 20 years, has seen positive change in a range of clean cooking contexts. In Bangladesh, women from indigenous communities have been trained to produce, market, install, and maintain improved cookstoves, opening the door to technical roles and new income streams. In Sierra Leone, women entrepreneurs have built clean cooking businesses that do more than sell products: they create livelihoods, build trust with customers, and strengthen women’s standing in their households and communities. In Benin, Kenya, and Burundi, EnDev's work with women’s associations and marginalised groups has shown the value of approaches that respond more closely to local social and economic conditions, rather than assuming one model will fit all.
From participation to influence
For women to actively engage in clean cooking value chains as entrepreneurs and not just end users, the conditions for their participation need to be right. Financing tools, such as results-based financing need to be designed to optimise women’s participation – with additional support provided where needed. This may include, specific efforts to recruit women-led business into RBF programmes and targeted training focused on building confidence, leadership, and decision-making abilities. With such support in Cambodia, the Higher Tier Cooking Component (an EnDev associated project), implemented by SNV, was able to ensure that over 60% of businesses in the RBF programme were female led. Women can also play a unique role as promoters of clean cooking technologies, utilising their role as cooks and their strong female networks. In Tanzania, through the EnDev programme, SNV supported women to become Clean Cooking Advocates (CCAs), trusted voices promoting improved cookstoves in their communities. This role not only encourages other women to adopt improved cooking practices but also generates incomes for CCAs through comissions.
Taken together, these experiences point to something that is easy to miss when the conversation stays narrowly focused on access numbers. Clean cooking is not only about replacing one appliance or fuel with another. It is also about how markets are built, whose labour is valued, who is visible in the value chain, and who gains real room to act. Health, climate, and livelihoods are all part of that story, but so are recognition, agency, and fairness. The sector does not need more grand claims here. It needs honesty about what tends to work and where blind spots remain. Clean cooking initiatives are stronger when they take women seriously not only as beneficiaries, but as workers, leaders, investors, partners, and citizens with distinct needs and ambitions. They are stronger, too, when they pay attention to the people who are easiest to miss.
These questions will be taken up in the upcoming Deep Dive session Scaling Gender-Just Access to Clean Cooking Solutions at IVECF 2026, where partners will reflect on how clean cooking efforts can better connect access, inclusion, safety, and women’s economic leadership.
