With research and development (R&D) support from the Transforming Energy Access (TEA) platform, ICLEI Africa builds on almost 30 years of experience to bring clean cooking access to informal settlements across African cities.
ICLEI Africa is a network of over 450 cities, towns, and regions across over 50 African countries. The organisation plays a key role in influencing sustainability policy and driving local action for low-emission, nature-based, equitable, resilient and circular development.
According to the World Bank [1], over 50% of the world’s population (4.4 billion people) now live in urban areas, and this number is expected to rise. More than 60% [2] of Africa’s urban dwellers reside in informal settlements, many lacking safe and reliable energy. As a result, households often rely on polluting fuels such as kerosene and wood, with serious health, safety, environmental, and economic impacts that disproportionately affect women and children.
Local governments play a critical role in enabling access to clean, affordable, and sustainable energy, but many face constraints in planning and financing.
Cooking up a plan
To address these challenges, the Enabling African Cities for Transformative Energy Access (ENACT) project is working to increase access to clean cooking in informal settlements by creating an enabling environment for local governments and the private sector to work together.
ENACT delivered results through:
- Engaging national and local governments (Freetown, Sierra Leone, and Kampala, Uganda) to strengthen their role in sustainable energy and clean cooking access.
- Supporting private sector partners to pilot and implement context-specific clean cooking solutions.
To date, ENACT has:
- Provided clean cooking access to over 20,000 people.
- Worked with 10 local partners, including technology providers Afrigas, ILEM Africa, and Paygas.
- Engaged community specialists like Actogether Uganda to support outreach.
- Partnered with communications teams to run awareness campaigns.
The project has trained 215 government officials and engaged more than eight local authorities in Sierra Leone and Uganda. ENACT has facilitated community engagement through partnerships with savings groups and created sustainable employment opportunities.
The power of partnership
ICLEI’s project is a pioneer of TEA’s Local Partnership Inclusion (LPI) support service, one of three African-led initiatives. Launched in 2019, LPI aims to drive partner expertise across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and the Indo-Pacific. By directly funding local partners, rather than intermediaries headquartered elsewhere, projects are delivered to better serve communities.
ENACT has demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach, exceeding all targets and generating significant cost savings for users, including approximately 80,000 UGX per user month in Uganda and 400 Leones per month in Sierra Leone.
ICLEI Africa’s strength lies in its long-standing expertise, says Dr Meggan Spires, Director of Climate Change, Energy and Resilience
ICLEI Africa has experience working in Africa for almost three decades.
Explains Meggan, highlighting its role connecting key sectors, partners and disciplines.
We see ourselves as knowledge brokers and shapeshifters, harnessing the power of collaboration for scaled local action.
She adds the incentive comes from the people at the heart of these interventions.
African cities want to lead their own transitions and chart their own futures.
Megan notes:
What is most exciting about ENACT for us, is the ability to directly influence one of the most critical and urgent calls to action on our continent – universal access to clean cooking in African informal settlements. We are very proud to be one of the few Africa-based partners in the TEA platform doing this.
Carine Buma, Senior Specialist, Climate Change, Energy and Resilience, and ENACT Project Manager commented that working closely with cities and informal settlements has:
deepened our understanding of their unique challenges, needs, capacity and policy gaps, and the need for substantial funding to flow into the clean cooking sector.
Meggan adds that TEA’s support for innovation at the public-private intersection is a distinctive strength, making it “really exciting to work at that interface”.
Meggan and Carine both believe ICLEI has brought benefits to the TEA platform.
ICLEI’s global network helps give visibility.
Explains Carine, while Meggan highlights its ability to connect local governments with the private sector, underpinned by deep, Africa-based contextual knowledge.
Be patient and flexible
Reflecting on lessons for future implementers, Carine emphasises patience, flexibility and drawing on local expertise.
“Always listen to the local partners and work with them rather than imposing on them, because they have a better understanding of their community,” advises Carine. “They understand their needs better than we do.”
Meggan highlights “knowledge brokering” as a critical capability for effective partnerships:
“If there’s not adequate knowledge-brokering, none of the global challenges we face are going to be fixed.”
Looking ahead, ICLEI Africa is focused on scaling the impact of ENACT. Building on its success, ICLEI Africa is now implementing the ENACT Uganda Scale Up (ENACTUS) between 2024 and 2026, with funding from the British High Commission via TEA, which aims to expand clean cooking access to 6,000 households (30,000 people) in the Greater Kampala Metropolitan Area.
Carine urges:
“We need to scale what has been learnt through ENACT as soon as possible – no longer pilots – for us to make a scaled difference, which is what our continent, and the world, needs.”
Find out more about the Transforming Energy Access platform.
This material has been funded by the UK Government via the Transforming Energy Access (TEA) platform. However, the views expressed do not necessarily reflect the UK Government’s official policies.
[1] https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/urbandevelopment/overview
[2] https://unhabitat.org/bridging-the-affordability-gap-towards-a-financing-mechanism-for-slum-upgrading-at-scale-in-nairobi