Policy Pathways for Mapping Clean Energy Access for Cooking in the Global South—A Case for Rural Communities

Currently, over 1.5 billion people, especially in the Global South, live without access to modern energy for household uses, especially for cooking. Therefore, this study examines the cooking space of the Global South with a specific focus on the rural communities to map alternative energy sources, technologies and supporting policies to drive clean cooking services for improved socioeconomic development. It begins with a literature review on clean cooking technologies and clean energy access for the Global South, which leads to the suggestion of clean cooking policies by mapping technology, affordability, accessibility, climate action, business model and local capacity. In order to ensure that the validation is appropriate, three online questionnaires were designed to capture three categories of key stakeholders with distinctive and complementary interests in clean energy access for cooking: (i) End-users, (ii) Energy Suppliers and (iii) Interest Groups in rural communities in Fiji, Ghana and Nigeria. The responses are analysed to conduct a comparative study across the three countries examined. Based on the above, an attempt is made to present broad base policy pathways for adopting clean cooking services in the rural community for sustainable development. The policy pathways harmonize the major stakeholders in the cooking space: Governments, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), clean energy developers, business services and the end-users. In addition, a business model in the context of a rural community cooking space is proposed, stating that the initial life of the clean cooking business should be government-driven and, thereafter, followed by incentive-driven at the mid-life of the business (say, 25% technology penetration) and private-sector-driven at the late-life (say, 45% technology penetration). It is expected that the effort made in this work could be advanced by investigating the detailed techno-economic parameters of clean cooking technologies that could be influenced by the policy pathways established in connection with the sociocultural factors associated with energy services.