At dawn, in a dusty compound somewhere in western Kenya, the school kitchen is already alive. A few men crouch beside blackened pots, coaxing reluctant flames with strips of newspaper and handfuls of dry twigs. The air thickens almost immediately. Smoke hangs in the doorway, smarting eyes and throats. By the time the first pupils arrive, the cooks are sweating, coughing and squinting through a haze that has become the country's quiet, daily normal.
Across Sub-Saharan Africa, millions of institutional meals in schools, hospitals, and prisons are still prepared on smoky, inefficient stoves, but what looks like a local kitchen problem is in fact an environmental and public-health emergency. Kenya, a country that prides itself on climate leadership, now sits squarely at the centre of this contradiction: a nation with one of Africa's most ambitious clean-cooking strategies, yet still shackled to firewood and charcoal for feeding its institutions.
đ The Scale of the Challenge
The numbers are astonishing. For schools, especially those participating in feeding programmes, this translates into a vast appetite for fuelwood. One assessment by the Clean Cooking Alliance estimates that more than 90 percent of schools use firewood, consuming well over a million tonnes every year.
â ī¸ The Human Toll
Each of those meals leaves a mark. Forest edges are pushed back further to supply the next term's stockpile. Where institutional kitchens cluster around urban centres or densely populated counties, the surrounding woodlands are disappearing fastest. And then comes the human toll. Cooks and support staff inhale thick smoke for hours a day, while learners queue for lunch through clouds of particulate matter. In hospitals, where the sick are supposed to recover, kitchens often use open fires just metres away from wards, and inmates in correctional institutions breathe in confined fumes daily.
đ¨ââī¸ Health Alert: Scientific studies have recorded levels of fine particulate matter in institutional kitchens far above the World Health Organisation's safe limits, and the link between prolonged exposure to biomass smoke and respiratory illness is well documented. For the cooks, the cost is borne in their lungs; while for pupils, patients and prisoners, it is a chronic, avoidable exposure built into the very act of eating.
đ¯ The Missing Middle of Clean Cooking
When policymakers and donors talk about the "clean-cooking transition," they almost always mean households. Billions of dollars in aid and private investment are being mobilised to help families switch to LPG, electricity or bioethanol. That is necessary work, but it leaves out what experts now call the "missing middle": institutional cooking.
⨠The Scale Opportunity
Institutions, unlike households, offer scale. A single school can feed hundreds of children daily and one county hospital can cook for thousands. Because they operate under formal management and budgets, they can make collective purchasing decisions and adopt efficient systems quickly.
A clean-cooking project that reaches one institution could benefit hundreds of people overnight.
And yet, institutional kitchens are largely ignored in the policy conversation. They fall between the cracks, deemed too large for household programmes and too small to attract infrastructure finance. As a result, the sector remains trapped in smoky limbo.
đ¸ The Financing Gap
In the end, this is less a question of technology than of will. Kenya's government has already laid out the plan, but it now needs to finance and enforce it.
Back in that smoky school kitchen, the cooks have no illusions about policy documents or global finance flows. They care about breathing, about not spending every week begging for more firewood, about seeing their pupils eat on time without the sting of smoke in their eyes. The transformation they need is mechanical, practical, and immediate. The question is whether anyone with the power to act will match their urgency.