Nigeria adds 5 million clean cooking users yearly yet experts warn progress lags

Nigeria is adding roughly 5 million people with access to clean cooking solutions each year, yet this rate falls well short of what is required to end harmful traditional cooking practices by 2030, experts warn.

In the southeastern city of Uyo, street vendor Happiness Emmanuel still relies on kerosene-soaked firewood each morning to fry akara for her customers. Like millions of other Nigerian women, she spends hours collecting fuelwood and breathing smoke that damages her lungs and those of her children. Such scenes remain common across the country even as official figures show steady growth in clean cooking uptake.

What happened

Annual data compiled by government and international partners indicate that approximately 5 million Nigerians gain clean cooking access annually through expanded liquefied petroleum gas distribution, improved biomass stoves and, to a lesser extent, electric induction cookers. This incremental progress has lifted the national clean-cooking access rate from under 10 percent a decade ago to around 25 percent today.

However, population growth of roughly 2.4 percent per year means the absolute number of people still dependent on polluting fuels continues to rise. Health researchers link household air pollution from traditional cooking to over 100,000 premature deaths in Nigeria each year, with women and young children bearing the heaviest burden.

Internal studies also connect reliance on fuelwood collection to local deforestation pressures and increased time poverty that limits girls’ education and women’s economic participation.

Why it matters

Health and gender consequences

Prolonged exposure to smoke from open fires is associated with respiratory infections, heart disease, stroke and low birth weight. Experts note these risks disproportionately affect women who cook daily and children who stay close to their mothers. Faster transition to clean cooking would therefore deliver immediate public-health benefits and support broader gender-equality objectives.

Climate and forest linkages

Traditional cooking drives demand for charcoal and firewood, contributing to forest degradation and greenhouse-gas emissions. Scaling clean cooking is viewed as a low-cost way to cut short-lived climate pollutants such as black carbon while easing pressure on woodlands already stressed by agricultural expansion and urban demand.

Gap between ambition and delivery

Nigeria’s revised Nationally Determined Contribution under the Paris Agreement includes a target to reach 50 percent clean-cooking access by 2030 and universal access by 2050. At current rates the country will miss the 2030 milestone by a wide margin, analysts say. Funding shortfalls, volatile LPG prices, weak rural distribution networks and cultural preferences for certain cooking methods are cited as persistent barriers.

What comes next

Policy makers are exploring blended finance models that combine public subsidies, carbon-market revenues and private investment to lower the cost of LPG and electric cooking options. Pilot projects testing pay-as-you-go biogas digesters and solar-powered cookers are under way in several states, though scaling these remains challenging.

International partners have called for stronger integration of clean-cooking targets into Nigeria’s next climate and energy plans ahead of COP30 in Brazil. Without accelerated action, experts caution that both national health indicators and local forest health will continue to suffer despite the annual addition of millions of new clean-cooking users.

Nigeria’s experience mirrors wider trends across sub-Saharan Africa, where clean-cooking gains are outpaced by population growth. Closing this gap is increasingly seen as essential to delivering multiple sustainable-development objectives simultaneously.

Sources

https://news.mongabay.com/2026/10/5-million-nigerians-gain-clean-cooking-access-annually-but-its-not-enough-experts-say/

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