From Projects to Systems: Strengthening Institutional Coordination for Nigeria's Clean Cooking Transition
New policy analysis by Chioma Ome, From Projects to Systems: Nigeria has clean cooking projects aplenty, but no system to show who keeps using them.
Executive Summary
Only 26.2 percent of Nigeria's population had access to clean cooking fuels and technologies in 2023, despite a National Clean Cooking Policy, Mission 300 commitments and a growing range of programmes. This analysis argues that Nigeria's challenge is no longer only a shortage of interventions. Coordination functions are spread across several formal and emerging structures, with no clear chain linking policy direction, federal and state implementation, common measurement, sector-wide data, learning and accountability. The result is fragmented data, overlapping beneficiary counts and little visibility of whether households sustain clean cooking. Drawing on Kenya's experience, the analysis proposes a minimum institutional framework with four connected functions: a coordination and accountability spine, a federal–state interface, a common results framework that tracks distribution, adoption and sustained use, and a Clean Cooking Industry Monitoring, Observatory and Reporting Framework (CCIMORF). It argues that coordination would also make Nigeria's clean cooking sector more attractive to carbon finance.
Key Findings
Only 26.2 percent of Nigerians had access to clean cooking in 2023, leaving about 168 million people without it.
Nigeria has a National Clean Cooking Policy, a Clean Cooking Committee, Mission 300 monitoring and a new Mission 300 technical working group, but no single chain connecting them.
Interventions implemented independently produce overlapping beneficiary counts and hide whether households keep using clean cooking.
Mission 300 reporting tracks Compact commitments but does not capture all clean cooking projects and household outcomes nationally.
Kenya raised household clean cooking access from 24 percent in 2022 to 33.3 percent in 2023/24 under a deliberate national transition strategy.
A five-level results ladder would move measurement from deployment to adoption, sustained use and transition.
Coordination would strengthen carbon-market readiness by enabling aggregation, consistent MRV and clear lines of authorisation.
Imagine a woman in a Nigerian community who receives an improved cookstove from one programme while another organisation promotes LPG in the same village. She benefits from both. Yet neither organisation may know about the other, and neither is responsible for tracking how her cooking changes. If the stove later falls out of use because its fuel is unavailable, the first programme may still count her as a success, and the second may record her separately as a household reached. In national reporting, her actual cooking journey is invisible.
That scene sits at the centre of Chioma Ome's Signature Analysis. Nigeria has no shortage of clean cooking activity. It has a National Clean Cooking Policy approved in 2024, a target of universal access by 2030, Mission 300 commitments, state initiatives, development-partner programmes and a growing private market. Yet only 26.2 percent of Nigerians had access to clean cooking in 2023, leaving about 168 million people without it.
Ome, an ETA Fellow with long experience leading clean energy distribution in Nigeria, argues that the country's challenge has a second layer. Beyond access, affordability and finance lies a problem of coordination.
Many structures, no single chain
The analysis maps a landscape of overlapping mechanisms. The National Clean Cooking Policy created a Clean Cooking Committee, sub-committees and monitoring requirements. The Department of Climate Change lists promotion of the policy among its functions. Mission 300 has a government-validated delivery and monitoring unit, and a Mission 300 clean cooking technical working group emerged in September 2026.
Each is useful. Together, Ome argues, they do not yet form a single chain linking policy direction, federal and state implementation, common measurement, sector data, learning and accountability. Mission 300's twice-yearly reporting tracks Compact commitments; it is not a national record of every clean cooking project, private deployment and household outcome. Earlier national surveys covered only seven states.
Preliminary conversations with people implementing these initiatives, which the paper is careful to describe as indicative rather than systematic evidence, suggest the same pattern: limited awareness of related activities across government, civil society and development partners.
A lesson from Kenya
Kenya offers a comparison. Under a deliberate national cooking transition strategy, built through a participatory, data-driven process, household clean cooking access rose from 24 percent in 2022 to 33.3 percent in 2023/24, although the urban–rural gap remains wide. The strategy makes accountability and continuous tracking one of its central agendas and tries to "join the fuel dots" between LPG, bioethanol, electric cooking and other pathways. Ome is clear that Nigeria should not copy Kenya's structure. It needs a coordination framework suited to its system.
A minimum framework, not another body
The analysis proposes four connected functions, built on what already exists. First, a coordination and accountability spine under the National Clean Cooking Policy, aligned with Mission 300. Second, a federal–state interface with state action plans, focal points and a shared reporting calendar. Third, a common results framework that separates distribution, adoption and sustained use. Fourth, a Clean Cooking Industry Monitoring, Observatory and Reporting Framework (CCIMORF), an industry data layer that gathers and validates deployment data from companies, NGOs and partners and feeds the national system.
A five-level results ladder runs from deployment through adoption and sustained use to the transition itself, and a simple data-and-decision cycle closes the loop between information and action.
The proposal also connects coordination to capital. A coordinated sector, the paper argues, can aggregate small interventions into investable portfolios, apply consistent measurement, reporting and verification, and clarify who develops, reports, validates and authorises carbon activities. That would make Nigerian clean cooking easier to finance through carbon markets.
Five questions
The analysis ends with a test. Success should be measured less by how many projects were completed than by whether Nigeria can answer five questions: who was reached, who adopted, who sustained use, where the remaining gaps are, and what the system will decide next because of what it has learned.
Ome's conclusion is direct. Nigeria does not primarily need another clean cooking project, reporting exercise or coordination body. It needs to connect what already exists into a system that converts investment into lasting change in how households cook.
The full analysis, including the proposed framework, the results ladder, the data and decision cycle and five tables, is available to download.
Suggested Citation
Ome, C. (2026). From Projects to Systems: Strengthening Institutional Coordination for Nigeria's Clean Cooking Transition. ETA Fellows Programme Signature Analysis. Abuja: Energy Transition Africa.