Cooking and the role of electricity

The permanence of traditional cooking stove and the use of biomass in rural areas is strongly related to the absence of electricity connection in households. As most of the homes lack a stable grid connection, access to clean cooking solutions is therefore rare in Ethiopia outside of big cities. As they are not reached by the grid, most rural households still adopt traditional fuels such as biomass, animal dung and firewood to cook and warm the household. (UN, 2025).

Traditional fuels like wood, dung, crop residues and charcoal—used by over 90–94 percent of Ethiopian households, especially rural ones— pose health risks to individuals and increases the probability of incidents. The stoves generate severe indoor air pollution (IAP) via inefficient combustion in open fires or three-stone stoves. Women and children face the major brunt, spending hours near smoke-filled hearths, leading to millions of disability-adjusted life years lost annually.

Indoor air pollution causes acute lower respiratory infections (ALRI), pneumonia and COPD; women using biomass have 2.88 times higher COPD risk, with 50 percent of female COPD deaths linked to it; symptoms like cough (20.4 percent), dyspnea (16.1 percent) and wheezing are common. Rural children show higher nasopharyngeal carriage of S. pneumoniae (91 percent) and H. influenzae (82 percent) tied to solid fuels. Pollutants (PM2.5, CO, PAHs) elevate stroke, ischemic heart disease, low birth weight and lung cancer risks; dung smoke exceeds CO limits at 4,000 ppm. Biomass particles induce cytotoxicity, DNA damage and inflammation in lung cells.

The Government of Ethiopia, supported by international organisations, issued in 2025 a National Clean Cooking Roadmap encouraging the adoption of cleaner and safer technology. This plan will be particularly impactful in rural areas where clean cooking solutions are used by less than 1% of the population (Ministry of Water and Energy, 2025).

Among the 12 households visited during our field trip only had a stable connection, able to support the functioning of electric kitchen plates. One of the household heads mentioned specifically that she moved from the remote Etege to a village closer to the main city of the area named xxx, specifically to avoid the smoke of cooking stoves, because she had serious skin issues.

Electricity Is Not Important for Food Storage and Cooking