The EU co-funded project Strengthening the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem for Clean Cooking – Higher Tier Cooking Component (HTCC) aims to accelerate Ethiopia’s clean energy transition by expanding the market for higher-tier clean cooking solutions.

Adopting an innovative, inclusive, and market-driven approach, the project positions local entrepreneurs as key drivers of change—supporting them with tailored business coaching, access to finance, and strengthened policy engagement. By fostering a more enabling environment and aligning institutional efforts, the project targets the distribution of modern, clean, and affordable cooking technologies to an estimated 100,000 households, including e-cook stoves and advanced biomass stoves.

Objectives

Despite progress toward Sustainable Development Goal 7, around 4 billion people globally still lack access to clean cooking technologies. In Ethiopia, over 96% of households rely on traditional biomass, primarily firewood (82%), leading to harmful health impacts, environmental degradation, and gendered social burdens—particularly for rural women exposed to indoor air pollution, heavy workloads, and risks of gender-based violence.

Ethiopia’s clean cooking market remains dominated by low-tier technologies, with higher-tier alternatives constrained by affordability issues, limited financing, lack of awareness, poor standards, and weak coordination.

This project addresses these barriers by promoting a transformative, market-based model that empowers local entrepreneurs, enhances public-private collaboration, and creates the conditions for a thriving, inclusive clean cooking sector.

Specifically, in this pilot phase, the project focuses on the following strategic objectives:

1. Strengthening local entrepreneurs: The project provides tailored business development support to local entrepreneurs, leveraging the expertise of the Energy Enterprise Coach to enhance their capacities and improve their competitiveness in the market.

2. Increasing access to finance: The project facilitates access to finance through results-based financing and an innovation challenge fund, enabling entrepreneurs to scale up their clean cooking technologies and business models.

3. Improving the enabling environment: The project supports and fosters coordination between key public and private actors, including the Ministry of Water and Energy (MoWE), the Petroleum and Energy Authority (PEA), and the Ethiopian Clean Cooking Alliance (ECCA), to create a more conducive business environment that promotes the growth of the clean cooking sector.

Project Activities

• Pipeline development & tailored support to businesses

  • Identification of promising clean cooking companies

  • Provision of technical and business training to selected companies

• Access to finance & innovation

  • Results-Based Financing scheme supporting the commercialisation of 20,000 higher-tier clean cookstoves

  • Innovation Challenge Fund supporting innovative clean cooking solutions and business models

• Support to the enabling environment

  • Stakeholder engagement and capacity-building through workshops, exposure visits and high-level events

  • Institutional and policy support (e.g. development of an Ethiopian Clean Cooking Roadmap by the Ministry of Water and Energy, support to the Ethiopian Clean Cooking Alliance)

  • Cookstove testing, certification and standards (e.g. provision of training and equipment)

  • Action plan for gender equity and social inclusion

Expected Results

• 100, 000 people (20,000 households) will gain access to higher-tier clean cooking technologies.

• 10 leading small and medium enterprises will have integrated higher-tier clean cooking solutions into their product offers.

• 500 jobs will be created, with at least 30% filled by women.

• Conducive enabling environment for the commercial dissemination of higher-tier clean cooking solutions.