MOBILIZING
Gender-lens Investment
for Clean Cooking

Gender-focused investments

can help bridge the $10 billion

per year gap in clean cooking finance.

Today, investment in the clean cooking sector hovers around $200 million a year.

It's a fraction of the estimated $10 billion per year required to achieve universal access.

The current investment scenario in clean cooking reflects both progress and challenges in transitioning millions of people away from polluting fuels. Investment reaching clean cooking companies grew at a compound annual rate of 20% from 2014 to 2020. Yet, if this growth rate continues, it will be 2036 before investment levels in clean cooking companies surpass the $1 billion mark.

Clean cooking urgently needs more capital, and that capital needs to come from a much wider pool of investors with varying appetites for risk and return. One up-and-coming source is gender-lens investing, which considers gender-based factors across the investment process. Gender-lens investing can create the enabling environment for just and inclusive clean cooking transitions by increasing women’s role in developing and implementing equitable clean cooking interventions. Yet, only 9 percent of all energy sector development finance has gender equality as an objective.

_{^{© PayGo Energy}}

Women are pivotal players in global sustainable economies, and investing in women and girls yields multiple social, economic, and environmental benefits. Systematic, gender-smart approaches benefit society as a whole. Evidence from other sectors, including forestry, agriculture, and water, demonstrates that projects with a gender-sensitive approach are more likely to succeed.

Given its range of co-benefits and position at the nexus of gender, climate, and health, clean cooking is an ideal sector for gender-lens investment. The challenge for investors is often knowing where to start.

_{^{© ATEC Global}}

Worldwide, gender-lens investors have already committed up to $20 billion, and transformative initiatives such as 2X Global are mobilizing more from a wide range of capital providers.

Yet gender-lens investors have been somewhat blind to women’s unpaid work, including clean cooking, and have not yet developed a robust investment focus on the care economy.

However, a growing number of resources are helping investors integrate gender into the investment process and identify opportunities within the clean cooking sector specifically.

The increased focus on gender-lens investment is an opportunity to unlock capital for clean cooking, which sits at the nexus of gender, climate, and health.

While gender-lens investment has been slow to grow, a promising upward trend could be a game-changer for the clean cooking sector. Major funds, including the Global Innovation Fund, Denmark’s Investment Fund for Developing Countries, and BIX Capital, are applying a gender lens in the investment process and investing in clean cooking.

Which of the following benefits most influence investment decisions in clean cooking?

Assured financial returns on clean cooking enterprise investments
Quantifiable environmental benefits from improved clean cooking technologies
Government support & incentives promoting clean cooking

The emPOWERment Bond: Valuing Women’s Time

Results-based financing (RBF) could be a valuable tool in bridging the funding gap for clean cooking. To date, RBF has mainly focused on climate and health outcomes while neglecting gender impacts. To address this issue and find better ways of measuring and valuing the time women lose due to household energy use, CCA is collaborating with Duke University and C-Quest Capital to create a framework for a new RBF instrument called the emPOWERment bond.

The emPOWERment bond will produce guidance on quantifying, verifying, and monetizing the gendered time-use and productivity benefits of improved biomass cookstove initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa while contributing to an inclusive energy transition.

The emPOWERment bond operates on a concept similar to that of carbon credits generated by clean cooking programs, but there are some notable differences. While carbon credit sales subsidize clean cooking programs based only on their climate impact, the emPOWERment bond recognizes the significant benefits that clean cooking can provide in terms of livelihood, health, and gender equality.

_{^{© Mauro Vombe / Clean Cooking Alliance}}

The emPOWERment bond framework considers the impact of adopting and using clean cooking technologies on women’s time management and productivity. By using these technologies, women can reduce their exposure to household air pollution, save time on cooking, and reduce the number of trips to collect firewood. This time can then be redirected toward pursuing educational opportunities, engaging in economic activities, or simply resting.

“Understanding the time savings and empowerment benefits of improved cooking interventions is often discussed based on anecdotes or using ad hoc measures of impact, but it deserves the same level of rigorous attention as methods deployed to understand health and climate implications.”

_{^{–MARC JEULAND, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF PUBLIC POLICY AND GLOBAL HEALTH, DUKE UNIVERSITY}}

Leveraging this framework, funders interested in advancing gender equality and energy access could commit resources, contingent upon achieving impact results, to investors who, in turn, could provide finance to programs promoting improved biomass stoves.

This funding would decrease the cost of implementation and enhance the affordability of clean cooking solutions to rural consumers. With greater affordability and scale, more households would adopt these solutions, saving women more time.

“I used to be busy all the time. Cooking with traditional cookstoves was time-consuming. Now I have time to grow vegetables, which we eat and sell in the market. Not only am I breathing better, but I’m also supporting my family. Clean cooking has changed my life.”

_{^{–SITA BAI, COOKSTOVE USER IN INDIA}}

Moreover, these newly empowered women, especially those able to capitalize time savings into income gains and greater agency, could increase demand for higher-tier solutions. With increased buying power, women and their families can move up the energy ladder. The emPOWERment bond offers a pivotal, market-based solution to scale clean cooking access without leaving behind the rural poor.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Find out more from CCA and its partners about the opportunities for RBF to expand access to clean cooking solutions:

CCA's Investor Resources

2X Toolkits

Clean Cooking RBFs: Key Design Principles