Kenya

Exposure to smoke from polluting, open fires or inefficient fuels – the primary means of cooking and heating for nearly three billion people in developing countries – causes about 4 million premature deaths, including 21,650 deaths in Kenya, every year. 

Cooking smoke contributes to a range of chronic illnesses and acute health impacts such as early childhood pneumonia, emphysema, lung cancer, bronchitis, cardiovascular disease, and low birth weight. Women and young children are the most affected, with close to 5,000 children in Kenya dying every year as a result of acute lower respiratory infections caused by the smoke from the use of solid fuels. 

Eighty percent of Kenyan households rely primarily on solid fuels for their cooking needs, with 8.1 million households using wood and 1.3 million households using charcoal. Only 3.7 million households use LPG as their primary fuel, while only 3% of households own electric cooking appliances. Reliance on biomass for cooking and heating leads to environmental degradation from increased pressure on local natural resources and forces women and children to spend many hours each week collecting wood. Inefficient cooking also contributes to climate change through emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane and aerosols such as black carbon.

Clean Cooking Can Help

The use of cleaner, more modern stoves and fuels can dramatically reduce exposure to harmful smoke; provide myriad economic opportunities for Kenyans; and help reduce forest degradation and slow climate change. More modern stoves and cleaner fuels also reduce the time that people—usually women and girls—need to spend collecting fuel, freeing up time for income-generating activities or schoolwork.

Progress

Kenya has seen steady advancement in transforming the cookstoves and fuels sector, which has resulted in increased investment. Here are some of the accomplishments and activities so far:

• The Government of Kenya has recognized clean cooking as a nexus issue and has included it in government policies and development plans such as the National Climate Change Action Plan (2018-2022).
• Thanks to investments and innovation like PAYGO and smart gas meters for LPG, clean cooking solutions are becoming more affordable.
• Donors and investors are increasingly interested in growing Kenya’s clean cooking market, resulting in the emergence of local industrial cookstoves manufacturing, local assembly, and new market players.
• Standards have been developed for biomass cookstoves and for meters dispensing LPG from cylinders. In addition, the ISO test sequence standard has been adopted for stove emissions, performance, safety and durability.
• The Alliance is working closely with the Clean Cooking Association of Kenya (CCAK) to enhance standards and labeling for clean cooking biomass technologies. The program will provide consumers with easy-to-understand information on stove and fuel performance to help them make informed purchasing decisions.
• A national clean cooking sector study was released in November 2019 to inform policies and implementation plans.

It should also be noted that under the Finance Act 2020, the Government of Kenya reinstated a standard rate of 14% VAT on various clean cooking products, including stoves, biogas and LPG. LPG was granted a one-year extension of zero-rating and so the effective date of the change in its VAT status is July 2021. This is a reversal from the Government of Kenya’s decision in 2016 to exempt clean cooking stoves and fuels from VAT and will obviously have a significant impact on the industry in that it will increase prices for consumers. The Alliance will continue to work with CCAK and other stakeholders to advocate for policy solutions that are conducive to market growth