- Date
- 5th November 2026
- Categories
- eCooking
By Dr. Simon Batchelor OBE (Gamos Ltd. / Loughborough University).
In October 2026, the Government of Burundi and Weza Power signed a 25-year partnership intended to mobilise US$1.4 billion and connect more than 1.2 million households and businesses. The programme will draw on commercial capital and concessional finance. Alongside the cost of poles, lines and transformers, the partners have been considering a proportionally smaller investment: putting an electric cooker into the newly connected homes. Using public headline figures and their own stated assumptions, we find that for an additional investment equivalent to about 7% of the network cost, electric cooking could more than double annual electricity sales per adopting household, even before carbon revenue is counted. Anzana’s announcement.
In this blog we give headline calculations as to why that is realistic and try to validate some of their assumptions.
I first became aware of this at COP29 in Baku, where in the NDC pavilion the Government of Burundi, Weza Power and Article Six Group presented a proposal to use carbon finance to support electrification and electric cooking. Watch the COP29 session. While it was exciting to see their use of Article 6 carbon to make this work, what stayed with me was a point about the electricity network itself. They were publicly declaring that the predictable demand of eCooking would improve the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) and enhance their network investment. They had realised and incorporated in their models eCooking, noting that once a utility has brought a line to a village and connected a household, the financial return depends partly on what that household can do with the connection (as I discussed in a previous blog). A family that cooks with electricity can afford to purchase considerably more power through the same meter.
While we have the carbon model, we, for obvious reasons of commercial sensitivity, don’t have the full investment model. However I have been looking at their assumptions and doing some headline calculations.
The household budget behind the electricity demand
The assumptions presented in Baku give a useful starting point. A household using electricity for lighting, phone charging and other appliances was assumed to consume around 350 kWh a year, or 29 kWh a month. For a household adopting electric cooking, the figure rose to 890 kWh a year. Cooking accounts for the additional 540 kWh annually, or 45 kWh a month.
As with many countries, Burundi has a complex structure to its electricity tariff, based on levels of consumption. For a household already using 29 kWh a month, the first 21 kWh of cooking would fall in its lowest tariff band, at about 2.7 US cents per kWh. The remaining 24 kWh would be at about 9.6 cents. At those rates, cooking would add roughly US$2.90 to the monthly bill before any additional taxes or fees. That makes switching more attractive for families buying cooking fuel, while giving the utility about US$35 in additional gross sales per cooking household each year.
The challenge here in discussing the benefits of this scenario is that these rates may not be full cost recovery? Indeed at the COP29 presentation, the speakers suggested alternative tariff rates. A Weza household tariff has yet to be confirmed publicly, so the amount of additional revenue available to support the investment remains an open part of the calculation. For the remainder of the blog I have taken a flat rate illustrative tariff of 20 US cents per kWh, to represent the effect of eCooking consumption. If the tariff remain low it will create a social good for the consumer – with the government effectively subsidising the population via its PPA obligations. On the other hand if the tariff is raised to full cost recovery this will lead to PPA financing being serviced via electricity revenue.
In order to illustrate the financing possibilities, I have chosen a 20 cent tariff (regardless of consumption). This helps me avoid trying to represent the social good purchased by the PPA. At 20 cents the annual electricity sales rise from $70/y to $178/y per adopting household. From the utility’s side of the meter, that is $108 a year in additional sales. From the family’s side, it is $9 a month to cook with electricity. For a family buying charcoal or firewood, some or all of that $9 can come from money it already spends on meals.
In an earlier MECS blog, I used World Bank Multi-Tier Framework (MTF) surveys from Kenya, Rwanda and Ethiopia to look at the spending an electricity meter misses. As I noted then, “In some groups, households spending almost nothing on electricity are spending two, three or more times as much on cooking fuels.” Among Kenyan households consuming less than 5 kWh a month, for example, the median electricity bill was around $2, while median cooking-fuel expenditure was nearly $7. Judged by the electricity bill alone, it would be easy to underestimate what those families already spend on energy.
Aha, but that was Kenya I hear you say. I have now looked at Burundi’s own 2021 MTF survey. Among 1,152 grid-connected households with usable expenditure records and survey weights, the weighted median household spent 2.8 times as much on non-electric fuels used for cooking as on electricity. So the pattern is similar to Kenya. Among the 1,114 households that bought fuel, median fuel expenditure was around 45,000 Burundian francs a month, about $23 at the 2021 exchange rate. Even among fuel purchasers paying no more than 5,000 francs a month for electricity (albeit on a low tariff), median fuel spending was about $15.
This suggests that assumptions about consumption and expenditure are reasonable. At the illustrative (high) tariff, the cost of 45 kWh was within the existing fuel budget of 87% of the fuel purchasers in the MTF weighted sample, using the survey-period dollar equivalent. Consider a family spending $15 a month on charcoal. If electric cooking adds $9 to its electricity bill and brings its charcoal purchases down to $4, its combined cooking bill falls to $13. The utility gains $9 in sales and the family saves $2. This example illustrates how the same switch can work for both parties.
Of course at the moment much of Burundi does not have clean cooking and collects its fuelwood. For a family that collects its firewood, the starting point is different. Only 61 rural households in the MTF entered complete expenditure comparisons, and roughly half of that small weighted group recorded no cash outlay on the fuels included. Electric cooking may save a family hours of gathering wood, but in these cases the electricity top-up will be a new cash expense. For demand planning though, it therefore matters how many newly connected households already buy fuel, how many collect it, and how many do both. Urbanisation is changing the dynamic on this. For 2032, five years into the project, the UN projects that 31.3% of Burundi’s population will live in urban areas: about 5.31 million people out of 16.94 million. They are unlikely to be able to collect wood without paying anything. So an assumption that there will be 1.2m eCooking households who would otherwise have to pay for their alternative cooking fuel is not unreasonable.
So there is evidence that the $108 in additional annual sales is possible where families can redirect regular fuel purchases towards electricity.
What the extra demand does for the network
To see what this could mean for the infrastructure investment, take a round figure of one million households. The following is our illustration. The partners’ financial workbook they kindly shared with us covers the separate cooking and carbon business; it does not calculate a before-and-after return for the whole electricity concession. So this is us speculating but with their assumptions.
At 350 kWh per household and 20 cents per kWh, one million households would generate $70 million in annual electricity sales. At 890 kWh, sales reach $178 million. The utility must buy and deliver the additional power. For illustration, suppose half of electricity revenue remains available for debt service after operating costs. Annual cash available for repayment then rises from $35 million to $89 million with the ‘with and without’ eCooking scenarios. The 50% debt servicing is our assumption: the actual margin depends on the cost of power, network losses, bill collection and any extra capacity needed when people cook.
The cooking model allows about $100 per installed stove. Equipping one million homes would therefore cost around $100 million, equivalent to about 7% of the $1.4 billion network investment. Treating the appliances as an additional cost could bring the combined financing requirement to $1.5 billion, or it could be part of the existing pledge of $1.4b.
We can compare those revenue sums on a common financing basis. Suppose the capital were borrowed in dollars at 2.15% over 25 years, with interest paid throughout, five years’ grace on principal and equal principal repayments thereafter. This follows the broad pattern of a World Bank IDA blend credit. It provides a benchmark; the actual partnership combines several sources of finance.
The clearest comparison comes in year six, when principal repayments begin. On the $1.4 billion network alone, that year’s payments (interest and principal) would be about $100 million, against $35 million available from household electricity sales. However, with the cookers included, the payment on say $1.5 billion, rises to about $107 million, but the cash available rises to $89 million. In other words, financing the appliances adds about $7 million to the first full year’s debt payment, while their assumed use adds $54 million to annual cash available for repayment.
The timing matters. With the cooking scenario, we assumed the utility still has to pay interest of about $32 million a year during the five-year grace period. If it retains the remainder of the assumed $89 million each year, it enters year six with a reserve of about $284 million. In this illustration, that reserve is sufficient to cover the years when repayments exceed annual electricity cash.
Across the 25 years, the assumed household electricity sales could support roughly $654 million of borrowing without electric cooking, rising to $1.66 billion with it, provided early surpluses are saved for later repayments. After paying for both the network and the appliances, that leaves approximately $164 million of financing headroom: the difference between the debt those cash flows could service and the $1.5 billion invested. Note I am presenting a measure of repayment capacity, not a profit forecast.
No carbon revenue is counted in that improvement. It comes from families using the network for a service they need every day.
What carbon adds
Carbon finance can help with a particular difficulty in delivering that additional demand: somebody must pay for the cookers before the first meal is cooked. Expected carbon receipts can help raise that upfront finance, that additional $100m; and once received, they can help repay it.
For illustration, take a carbon price of $25 per tonne, less $5 per tonne in revenue sharing. If one million participating households each generated 1.5 tonnes of verified cooking reductions annually, that would yield $30 million a year before other carbon costs and taxes. If those receipts lasted for the first ten years and were retained for debt service, the borrowing supported would rise from approximately $1.66 billion to $1.89 billion. Headroom above the $1.5 billion infrastructure-and-appliance investment would rise from $164 million to $394 million. After the carbon receipts end, households that continue cooking still provide electricity revenue.
Please note that I have assumed a rapid roll out of the new connections and of the associated kitchen appliances. The partners’ model phases stove installations and gives each group of stoves a five-year crediting life; our simpler illustration assumes full adoption from the outset and ten years of carbon receipts. The pace of connections, appliance replacements, network reinforcement, taxes, exchange rates and the cash cushion lenders require will all affect the financing that can actually be raised.
These figures are intended to show the scale of the opportunity.
Whether it is enhanced loan repayments, debt servicing, improved profitability or risk mitigation, the key point that I take from the Burundi plan is that from our illustration, financing the cookers adds about $7 million to the first year of principal and interest payments, while their use could add $54 million to the annual cash available for repayment (depending on tariff bands). For families already purchasing fuel, that relatively small additional investment opens a way to cook more affordably. For the utility, it brings a regular use of electricity onto a network it has already paid to build. That is a good reason to plan for cooking when designing the connection, sizing the transformer and setting the tariff. Carbon gives the partners an extra way to finance the appliance; the household service and the electricity sales already give them a reason to include it.
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Image credit: Graph produced by S. Batchelor from MTF data.
AI disclaimer: The author used AI to assist with analysis, drafting and editing.