The School Kitchen and Cooking Study (SKACS) Protocol: Building evidence to support scaling clean cooking in schools

By Nigel Scott, Beryl Onjala, Joseph Kariuki, Anna Clements, Will Clements and Jacob Fodio Todd.

There has been growing interest and increasing recognition of the potential benefits of transitioning institutional cooking, particularly schools in Africa and Asia, to clean energy. School kitchens often rely on biomass fuels such as firewood, consuming large quantities daily, so substantial reductions in biomass fuel use (and gains in associated benefits) can be achieved by working with a single institution. However, a critical barrier to scaling clean cooking solutions is the lack of robust, standardised data on energy use in these settings.

The School Kitchen and Cooking Study (SKACS) Protocol developed by MECS addresses this gap by providing a comprehensive methodology for data collection in school kitchens. There are two main aims:

1. To create a library of school cooking energy consumption spanning countries, cooking fuels, school feeding populations, school types, etc, which can be used through modelling to make predictions of energy consumption for other schools, based on simple inputs. This will be critical in enabling school eCooking transitions to benefit from carbon finance, aligning with the ambitions of the recently launched SEforALL Platform for Clean Cooking in Schools.
2. To generate baseline data for schools which are part of eCooking transition programmes so that cost savings, time savings, emission reductions, and other benefits can be quantified, maximising knowledge generation and learnings for scale up.

The SKACS protocol includes several stages, starting with identifying willing schools through short inception surveys that gather baseline information on school characteristics including number of learners cooked for, dishes and menus, and fuel use practices. For quantitative data collection, SKACS draws conceptually on established household energy measurement approaches such as the Kitchen Performance Test (KPT) and Controlled Cooking Test (CCT), adapting them for institutional contexts.  It introduces two complementary measurement approaches: day-level studies, which capture total daily fuel consumption, and dish-level studies, which measure the energy required to prepare individual dishes. The latter is particularly valuable for modelling and carbon accounting applications.

Field data collection is conducted by trained enumerators over multiple days, capturing at least five regular school days and repeated measurements for individual dishes (ideally three or more times per commonly cooked dish). Measurements include fuel weights used for cooking, cooking durations, and quantities of food prepared. Data is initially recorded on paper forms and subsequently digitised using platforms such as KoboToolbox. Complementary qualitative surveys capture insights from cooks and school management regarding operational practices and constraints.

In the last few months, the MECS programme with partners has been conducting SKACS in several countries: Nepal, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia. Data and results are just starting to be returned now. Below we introduce some background and early takeaways from the Uganda study.

Background of SKACS in Uganda

SKACS studies were conducted by the Centre for Integrated Research and Community Development Uganda (CIRCODU) in 30 schools, selected from a shortlist of 177 for which inception surveys had been undertaken. The schools were carefully chosen to shed light on potentially significant factors for fuel use, notably the school population receiving meals, and the types of stoves in use: three stone fire, efficient institutional improved cookstoves (eICS), and relatively inefficient improved cookstoves (iICS). The study looked exclusively at firewood as a cooking fuel and the focus was mainly on primary schools, although secondary schools were also covered (S iICS), with five days of study at each school.

Cooking at scale might lower fuel costs

To a point, per capita consumption of firewood drops as larger quantities of food are cooked and bigger pots are used (see graph below). Different foods have different profiles, such as beans vs posho, but the trend remains consistent: it is arguably cheaper and more efficient cooking in larger quantities. This is important to take into consideration when sizing and selecting cooking appliances for schools[1].

Foods cooked and menus vary little

There is a high level of uniformity of foods on school days and across schools, evident in both the wider set of schools (177) and the subset chosen for SKACS (30). Many Ugandan schools rely on a few common dishes cooked daily, namely porridge, posho, beans and tea – This can be seen below where the meals ‘posho & beans’, ‘porridge’ and ‘tea’ make up ~84% of all meals served. Consistency is a useful trait in making long-term food and energy decisions, and particularly useful in choosing suitable equipment, specialised for certain tasks.

Uganda is undergoing one of the most ambitious schools eCooking project to-date, targeting 100+ schools across the country, as part of a wider UK Aid eCooking Scale and Support Programme led by the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development and MECS. Once devices are installed, SKACS will be conducted again to measure energy consumption when cooking with electricity, rather than firewood. This will act as a critical step in understanding the differences between cooking with firewood and electricity, any economies evident and a host of other comparisons we’re yet to unpack from the baseline firewood data and surveys.

The ultimate objective of SKACS is to provide the means to develop a comprehensive dataset, or library, of school cooking energy consumption, that enables predictive modelling of energy consumption for other schools based on a few key inputs, provides critical sectoral data and supports evidence-based planning. By establishing relationships between variables such as number of servings and fuel use, stakeholders can estimate the implications of transitioning to clean cooking technologies, through models currently being developed. In doing so, SKACS can provide a critical evidence base to support investment decisions, policy development, and the design of scalable clean cooking interventions in institutional settings.

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[1] More research is needed to see if this holds with other fuels (e.g. charcoal, LPG & electricity) and appliances.

Featured image, top: Enumerator measuring daily firewood consumption in a school in Uganda (photo credit: CIRCODU, February 2026).

AI was used in summarising to create a first draft of this blogpost.