Improved cooking systems for sustainable and inclusive development

In 2018 we launched our first Clean Cooking Programme, a comprehensive project aimed at facilitating the transition from traditional cookstoves to more efficient models in sub-Saharan Africa. These improved cookstoves guarantee a reduction of over 60% in wood and charcoal consumption, allowing us to significantly cut the carbon footprint associated with cooking activities, while improving the quality of life for the families involved. In fact, the use of improved cookstoves entails benefits in terms of health, productivity, gender equality, forest and biodiversity conservation, and emissions reduction.

Eni has set itself the objective of reaching 10 million people across sub-Saharan Africa by 2027. Furthermore, Eni intends to encourage the transition from improved cookstoves to advanced solutions, which zero the use of unsustainable woody biomass. Following this evolution, the goal is to reach 20 million people by 2030, with an associate spending of 300 million dollars.

Clean Cooking is a pillar of Eni’s effort to contribute to improving living standards in Sub-Saharan Africa; for this reason, Eni endorsed the “Clean Cooking Declaration: Making 2024 the pivotal year for Clean Cooking” promoted by the International Energy Agency (IEA) to accelerate universal access to more modern cooking systems. This is an essential step towards ensuring access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all, as established by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 7.

Besides improving access to energy, clean cooking projects contribute to reducing the production of charcoal and the direct use of firewood, major drivers of deforestation in many African countries. In addition, the production and distribution of these improved cookstoves fosters entrepreneurship and strengthens local economies, as they are produced and distributed locally, in collaboration with national and international organisations already working in the region. The entire project adopts a gender perspective: gathering wood is a time-consuming and tiresome task traditionally entrusted to women; the adoption of Clean Cooking systems frees up time for more productive or educational pursuits. Finally, there are further positive impacts on health, as the new cookstoves produce less smoke.

Nearly 2.3 billion people currently use traditional biomass for cooking, of which 1 billion in sub-Saharan Africa¹. We aim to reduce the use of unsustainable wood fuels prevalent across the continent, where meals are cooked over open fires or rudimentary cookstoves, exposing people to harmful smoke from the burning of coal, charcoal and other products and materials linked to unsustainable supply chains.

Eni’s Clean Cooking initiatives gathered new impetus with the launch of the distribution of improved cookstoves in Côte d'Ivoire in 2022. In 2023, we launched a new phase of our “Promoting Energy Efficiency and Clean Cooking” project. In Mozambique we target 1.5 million people in the outskirts of Maputo and two central provinces of the country. In this context, the Clean Cooking initiative leveraged five small local companies for the production of cookstoves, which were used by approximately 25,000 households.
 

From 2025, we will also begin to distributing advanced stoves that will allow to eliminate the use of wood biomass: for example, induction stoves in urban areas and with gas cylinders in rural areas. At the same time, we will promote the use of agricultural waste as an alternative sustainable fuel. This waste is the result of the processing of residual agricultural biomass, and will also come from our agricultural feedstock chain. This fuel will avoid the combustion of unsustainable woody biomass. To accelerate their adoption, we are planning to launch five pilot projects in the cities of Maputo and Beira (Mozambique), Pointe-Noire (Republic of Congo), Kigali (Rwanda) and Boakè (Côte d'Ivoire).

Notes:

^{1) International Energy Agency (IEA) data}