The 2026 Summit on Clean Cooking in Africa, scheduled for July 9–10 in Nairobi, has been canceled. Co-hosted by Kenya, Norway, the United States, and the International Energy Agency, it was to be one of the most significant clean energy convenings of the decade. That event is no longer happening. But the crisis that made it necessary — the clean cooking crisis in Africa — has not been canceled. The nearly one billion people across Sub-Saharan Africa who cook over open fires and rudimentary stoves did not get a reprieve. Their situation is exactly what it was last week, and it will be exactly what it is next month. A canceled summit changes none of that. ACEN’s position is simple: the agenda must move forward, with or without the event.
The Scale of the Problem Hasn’t Changed
According to the IEA, approximately 600 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa lack access to clean cooking facilities — the largest concentration of this deficit anywhere in the world. Across the African continent and into the Caribbean, hundreds of millions more rely on wood, charcoal, agricultural waste, and kerosene to cook daily meals. The consequences are not abstract. The WHO attributes approximately 3.2 million deaths per year globally to household air pollution caused by solid fuel combustion, with women and young children bearing a disproportionate share of that burden — they are the ones closest to the flame, for the longest hours each day.
This is the clean cooking crisis in Africa: not a development footnote, but a public health emergency that quietly claims lives at a scale most energy policy discussions fail to reckon with. Beyond the mortality data, the clean cooking gap drives deforestation as demand for biomass strips tree cover across fragile ecosystems. It costs women and girls hours each day in firewood collection — hours that could be spent in school, in enterprise, or in rest. It is a crisis that intersects with climate, gender equity, public health, and economic development all at once, which is precisely why it belongs at the top of the global energy agenda.
The link to energy poverty SDG 7 is direct. SDG 7 calls for universal access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy by 2030. Both the IEA and IRENA have consistently flagged clean cooking as one of the most severely off-track components of that framework. Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for the large majority of the global clean cooking deficit. At current trajectories, that gap does not close by 2030. Canceling a summit does not change the math.
What the Summit Was Meant to Do
The Nairobi summit was not a symbolic gathering — it had a specific, practical agenda. Building on the USD 2.2 billion in commitments mobilized at the 2024 Paris Summit on Clean Cooking, it was designed to translate pledges into accelerated deployment: mobilizing the next wave of finance, aligning national policy frameworks to create enabling environments for clean cooking investment, and driving technology deployment through last-mile distribution networks and consumer finance solutions.
The co-hosts — Kenya, Norway, the United States, and the IEA — brought together a rare combination of political will, development finance capacity, and technical authority. That combination was assembled to do serious work. Canceling the event doesn’t dissolve the need that convened them. Finance still needs to be mobilized. Policy frameworks still need reform. The product standards, the grid-compatible clean cookstove supply chains, the blended finance vehicles — none of that infrastructure builds itself because a July conference got called off. The agenda still needs to happen. The conversations still need to be had. The commitments still need to be made. What changes is only the venue.
ACEN Is Keeping This Agenda Alive
The African & Caribbean Energy Network was built for exactly this kind of moment. When the formal structures of the global energy agenda stall, slip, or get canceled, ACEN’s role is to hold the line — to keep the conversation active through its membership network, to ensure that practitioners, investors, and policymakers across West Africa, Nigeria, the Caribbean, the Bahamas, and Barbados remain connected to this work and to each other.
In response to the cancellation, ACEN is recommitting to the clean cooking agenda through two immediate channels. First, through our regional coordinator network — our coordinators across West Africa, Nigeria, and the Caribbean are already engaged with clean energy stakeholders at the country level, and we are activating those networks to ensure that the policy and investment conversations the Nairobi summit was meant to advance continue through bilateral and multilateral channels. Second, through our course offerings — specifically “Energy Poverty: Causes, Solutions & SDG 7,” which equips energy professionals, advocates, and investors with the analytical foundation to understand the clean cooking gap and act on it. Clean energy in Africa and the Caribbean requires informed actors. That is what ACEN trains.
We are also tracking developments from what would have been the summit’s co-hosting governments and the IEA closely. If a replacement event, a virtual convening, or a working-level process emerges, ACEN members will be the first to know.
The Work Doesn’t Wait
ACEN is an independent membership network dedicated to accelerating the African and Caribbean energy transition through partnerships, investment facilitation, capacity building, and advocacy. Our mandate is not tied to any single event on any single calendar. It is tied to the people who cook over open fires every day in Lagos, Accra, Kingston, and Nassau — and to the professionals, investors, and policymakers who have the power to change that.
The 2026 Clean Cooking Summit in Nairobi was canceled. The work was not.
Enroll in “Energy Poverty: Causes, Solutions & SDG 7” to deepen your understanding of the clean cooking crisis and the solutions that can close it — or become an ACEN member to join the network that is keeping this agenda moving.
ACEN — African & Caribbean Energy Network. Advancing clean energy access across two continents.