1. Background and Introduction

Across Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries, clean cooking, including for institutions, remains one of the most stubborn access gaps, touching climate, forests, health, learning, and gender. Institutional meals including for schools, correctional facilities and hospitals are prepared on polluting biomass systems, with the sector been under-measured and under-financed, leaving institutions and cooks to shoulder hidden health and budget costs.

Kenya's institutional footprint makes this challenge - but also an opportunity - concrete. The country counts over 35,000 primary and more than 10,000 secondary schools across public and private management, serving millions of learners daily and cooking at scale. In the health sector, the government's 2023 census accounted for 14,883 institutions under the Master Facility List - hundreds of which operate large kitchens for patients and staff. In the correctional services, the country runs ~136 prisons, with an average population of 54,000 inmates, typically with high-volume kitchens. And over 90 percent of these kitchens rely on firewood and charcoal, driving local deforestation pressure and smoke exposure for cooks, teachers, students, patients and inmates.

While transitioning these institutions to clean cooking require significant investments, the flow of needed finance and investments for the sector has been very low. In fact, only 19 percent of the USD 544 million financing for clean cooking tracked by SEforALL in 20 countries in 2024 came to SSA. And the recent changes in global development financing further sharpens this urgency. Official development assistance (ODA) fell 7.1 percent in 2024, and developing countries paid a record US$1.4 trillion to service external debt in 2023, squeezing fiscal space for social services and energy transitions.

2. Financing Challenges for Institutional Clean Cooking

Institutional transition to clean cooking is faced with a number of challenges that must be addressed to unlock the opportunity in the sector. These include:

2.1 The Financing Gap & Market Failure

3. The Opportunity

Kenya's institutional cooking transition presents a high-impact, scalable investment opportunity:

There are real, near-term openings we can lean on across policy, finance, technology, data, and markets. And none of these require inventing a new system from scratch. They are doors that are already ajar for schools, hospitals, and prisons. For example, Kenya's energy and climate commitments already call for modern cooking in public institutions, providing political signal that creates an environment for institutional pipelines, while making it possible for public financiers and private lenders to align around one program. Schools, hospitals, and prisons also already have monthly budgets allocation for firewood and charcoal, providing predictable and immediate opening to align future payments without creating entirely new cost centers. Additionally, some local financing institutions like KCB and Equity Bank already have existing clean-energy financing products for institutions, demonstrating appetite for domestic finance, which can be leveraged to channel local-currency lending into standardized institutional kitchens. Multilateral and bilateral partners are also expanding clean-cooking and access finance, providing an opportunity to earmark part of those envelopes for institutional conversions. Maturing Carbon Markets and RBF facilities also offer clearer, performance-linked cashflows, creating room to recognize verified outcomes from institutional kitchens and to channel additional revenue into affordability. And, about 76 percent of public facilities in Kenya are electrified, providing a practical opening to deploy e-cooking systems. Finally, with many education, health, and school-meals philanthropies already active in Kenya, aligning their outcome funding with institutional kitchen upgrades is a natural fit - linking nutrition and climate benefits in one place.

4. Objectives of the Convening

This convening will seek to achieve the following key objectives:

• Crowd in DFIs, MDBs, LFIs, philanthropies and corporates to prioritize provision of capital and investments for institutional clean cooking.
• Show-case practical and scalable business & financing models for institutional clean cooking - e.g., energy-as-a-service, pay-as-you-save, pooled procurement + carbon/RBF, and interventions needed to enable them to scale.
• Match-make local institutional clean cooking enterprises with financiers and investors to enable acceleration of real projects and investments.
• Identify policy & regulatory fixes - procurement, standards, carbon/Article 6 alignment, fiscal incentives that should be addressed to unlock finance/investment for institutional clean cooking.
• Secure commitments toward institutional clean cooking program targeted at COP30 announcement.

5. Summit Format

6. Targeted Outcomes from the Convening

• Commitments from key stakeholders including DFIs, MDBs, Bilateral partners and philanthropic institutions towards investing in institutional clean cooking secured.
• Scalable business and financing solutions such as blended finance, EaaS plus mechanisms for structuring them for institutional clean cooking identified and designed.
• Local energy entrepreneurs are connected to potential investors to inject needed capital.
• Policy and regulatory barriers that hinder investments in institutional clean cooking are identified and interventions mapped.

Limited spaces available. Priority given to senior decision-makers from DFIs, MDBs, philanthropies, government ministries, and clean cooking enterprises.