Clean cooking is a critical issue that sits at the intersection of energy access
and affordability, climate action, public health, and gender equality.
Though debates on language remain, “clean cooking” refers to a range of technologies and fuels that allow people to cook food safely and efficiently, without many harmful associated emissions and pollutants. Lack of access to clean cooking methods, and the related indoor air pollution, is a challenge facing more than 2 billion people globally, and there are devastating—often deadly—health impacts that disproportionately affect women and children.
In addition to the crisis of health this creates, the care and domestic work of fuel collection, as
well as cooking and cleaning labor that often falls on women, girls, and gender-diverse people, can further entrench labor and economic inequalities.
Historically, clean cooking has not been a top priority within global energy and climate discussions. Feminist energy and climate advocates have worked for decades to bring it into focus in international policy spaces. Clean cooking should be understood within the broader political economy of energy extraction, care and climate debt, where women in the Global South continue to subsidize the energy systems of the wealthy through unpaid labour and unsafe fuels.
In recent years, attention and investment have increased significantly. In 2023, the Clean Cooking Alliance reported USD $218 million in capital investment in the sector (a fivefold increase from five years prior), though much of this was driven by debt financing and not grants.
Feminists demand greater, debt-free resourcing and action towards this critical climate, energy and gender issue, and note that this resourcing occurs within a capitalist framework that does not centre women or serve their needs.
Our vision of clean cooking envisions energy systems that nourish life rather than exploit it, where the labour, knowledge and leadership of women and gender-diverse people is recognised as central to climate justice, not peripheral to it.
