Supporting Global scale up of electric cooking, from niche technology to mainstream living
About GeCCo
According to the latest 2023 SDG7 Tracking Report some 2.3 billion people globally still cook using traditional polluting fuels and technologies. In fact, the ESMAP 2020 report The State of Access to Modern Energy Cooking Services (our emphasis) identified 4 billion as not having access to modern energy cooking (higher tier stoves that have such low household air pollution that they don’t affect health). While black carbon emissions dissipate quickly, their impacts are far-reaching. The WHO estimates that premature deaths from indoor air pollution total nearly 3.2 million annually, including about 237,000 children under the age of five who are more prone to pneumonia due to smoke exposure. In addition, annually a gigaton of CO2 emissions comes from burning non-renewable biomass fuels for cooking (about 2 per cent of the global total and equivalent to the amount produced by the aviation sector), whilst the burning of residential solid fuels comprises 58 per cent of global black carbon emissions. As household smoke is therefore both an agent of climate change and air pollution, substantial scale up of electric cooking solutions.
The Global electric Cooking Coalition (GeCCo) is comprised of eCooking advocates who work alongside other existing global and national initiatives promoting higher-tier cooking transitions by providing leadership, integration, knowledge, and funding that is exclusively focused on the rapid global scaling of electric cooking. The coalition represents a working group of partners and provides a platform for engagement to unify work, avoid duplication and optimise output quality.
Founding principles
The formation of a new global coalition to promote the transition to electric cooking resonates with and responds to UN Energy’s recent call for “Country-specific pathways and roadmaps…. to guide the transition to universal access to clean cooking by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2050.”
GeCCo’s initial target is to enable a mass transition into eCooking in at least 10 countries in SSA, Asia, & LAC in 7 years, where electricity increasingly becomes the cooking fuel of choice for a significant (>10%) proportion of households and institutions.
GeCCo partners will work together to meet the following key objectives:
- Drive the demand/usage of electricity for cooking – delivering both enhanced access to clean cooking and healthier power suppliers at all scales, thereby increasing their capacity to deliver access.
- Help bridge the gap in clean cooking access (an objective that is grossly off track from the 2030 SDG 7.1.2 target after a mere 12% increase over the past decade, a trend that will leave a quarter of the world’s people without access to clean cooking in 2030) by providing a powerful new aspirational choice for consumers of different types.
- Raise the level of political ambition (globally and nationally) for accelerating the rapid adoption of eCooking solutions via clear and consistent messaging about its advantages.
- Support accelerated improvement in households’ tiers of access – delivering affordable access to eCooking is also important to allow those already accessing improved cookstoves to transition to stoves that provide greater health, climate, and social benefits.
- Support decarbonization of households and institutions by shifting them from biomass, with its associated contribution to deforestation and toxic emissions (CO2 and black carbon) whilst ensuring that electric cooking is promoted alongside power sector decarbonization, thereby avoiding problematic lock-in to fossil fuel-based cooking fuels.
The complete version of GeCCo’s Founding Principles may be viewed here:
Project streams
- Carbon and Impact Financing
- Carbon credits from eCooking blueprint
- Equity and Inclusion
- Developing a framework to quantify gender and co-benefits
- Implementation
- ECooking in schools – Tanzania
- 1,000,000 eCooking unit programmes
- Energy Access
- Green Grid Initiative
- eCooking tariffs and tax exemptions
