Minister Habtamu Bets on a Smoke-Free Future While Flames of Doubt Linger

Jul 6 , 2025. By YITBAREK GETACHEW ( FORTUNE STAFF WRITER )

Habtamu Itafa's Ministry for Water & Energy unveiled a 10-year roadmap for national clean cooking last week, designed to replace traditional biomass cooking with electric, fuel-efficient, and solar-based stoves. Projected to cost 3.8 billion dollars, the roadmap is expected to lift clean-cooking access from today’s nine percent of households to 75pc by 2035.

It calls for the distribution of 36 million clean cookstoves nationwide, with electric options and efficient biomass units in urban areas and solar and advanced biomass stoves in rural communities. In places where cooking accounts for roughly 70pc of household energy use, the Ministry plans to make stoves affordable and extend repayment terms through microfinance for more than a year.

More than 90pc of the population still cooks over open fires fueled by wood, charcoal or cattle dung, a habit that claims more than 63,000 lives each year, most of them women and children. The practice drives rapid deforestation.

Mustofa Abdella, an economist and business consultant at Zafer Plus, lauded the roadmap’s scale and potential to create 335,000 jobs and economically empower two million women by reducing the time spent gathering fuel. Still, he cautioned that “low-income households may still struggle to access biomass technologies.”

He said success depends on strong government leadership, reliable carbon-tracking systems, localised manufacturing, and culturally sensitive behaviour-change campaigns.

According to Tagay Hamza, the Ministry's senior climate-change expert and lead coordinator of the program, the strategy “shifts the burden away from biomass toward renewable energy.”

The Ministry’s 380 million dollars contribution, 10pc of the total cost, seeks to leverage private and international funds. Minister Habtamu and his officials pinned their hopes on mobilising the remaining resources through a blend of grants, carbon finance, concessional loans, private investment and support from development partners. The World Bank, UNDP, African Development Bank (AfDB), the European Union, and the German cooperation agency, GIZ, have already offered technical and financial backing, alongside philanthropic groups such as the BARR Foundation, and climate finance brokers, including the Fair Climate Fund.

“Relying too heavily on donors is not sustainable,” Mustofa said, warning that strict funding conditions, entrenched cooking customs and weak coordination between ministries risk undermining progress.

He believes the expectation of a fivefold jump in private investment is “overly optimistic” given Ethiopia’s current business climate.

Despite these doubts, the government’s 380 million dollars “skin in the game” is intended to cement national commitment and trigger the larger financing architecture.

Carbon finance is expected to unlock more than one billion dollars, monetising emissions reductions, roughly 30pc of the roadmap’s funding. However, experts warn that past carbon-credit initiatives under the Clean Development Mechanism and voluntary markets have fallen short of plugging the country’s capital gaps. Although Ethiopia has registered 29 Verified Carbon Standard activities yielding nearly 600,000tns of reductions, and more than 1.6 million credits have been issued, slow verification, price volatility, and drawn-out revenue cycles have discouraged long-term investment.

“International partners often question the feasibility of budgets with high government control,” Tagay said, pointing to World Bank scrutiny of earlier programs.

To ease those concerns, the government wants to earmark dedicated budget lines, adopt a phased public funding approach, and prioritise blended finance to avoid delays tied to borrowing limits or donor disbursement schedules. According to Tagay, to guard against inflation and currency depreciation, local production incentives and foreign exchange hedging strategies will be implemented.

Officials have divided implementation into three phases. A two-year foundational period will pilot stoves and build institutional capacity to reach 18pc household coverage. In the medium term, they plan to focus on policy reforms and market development to bring clean cooking access to 57.74pc of homes in five years. The final stretch, the completion of the roadmap, envisions near-universal adoption and positioning Ethiopia as a global leader in clean-cooking solutions.

The roadmap’s financing framework allocates roughly 35pc of funds in grants meant to catalyse early deployment and support equity-based interventions. Concessional loans will comprise about 338 million dollars, targeting infrastructure and scaling operations. Private-sector investment, pegged at five percent, is expected to spur innovation and expand distribution channels under corporate social responsibility schemes.

The production and distribution of affordable stoves are expected to account for the largest share, at 2.6 billion dollars. Program administration and capacity building will draw 780 million dollars, including 390 million dollars in targeted subsidies for the poorest households, with a quarter of those funds allocated to revolving finance and pre-carbon financing to ensure sustainability.

Yet, barriers loom. Local financial institutions have yet to embrace clean-cooking finance, and commercial viability remains weak. Affordability constraints for low-income families could limit uptake, even with microfinance support. Officials view policy fragmentation and weak institutional mandates as having stalled previous efforts.

Habtamu Hailu, project coordinator for Sustainable Land Management at the Ministry of Agriculture, recalled that a cement-stove standard once under development was halted due to a lack of capacity.

“We've no standard, and energy is not within our mandate,” he said.

Biogas, piloted by the Ministry of Agriculture, remains a core technology, though adoption has been modest.

“Due to a lack of capacity, we're forced to drop a standard we're working on, although it was effective,” Habtamu told Fortune.

He acknowledged that carbon markets show promise but are still maturing and will require integration with forthcoming green legislation and forest restoration programs.

In the two decades beginning in 2000, Ethiopia lost more than 700,000hct of forest, nearly one percent of its natural cover each year, bringing forested land down from as much as 40pc of the country a century ago to 14pc. In 2024 alone, the country lost 67,600hct of natural forest. The roadmap aspires not only to cut indoor emissions but also to reverse forest degradation and promote environmental restoration.

Environmental consultant Semaw Asmare echoed concerns, calling the roadmap “ambitious but structurally weak.” He flagged unrealistic coverage targets, institutional fragmentation, unreliable data and the absence of a national biomass baseline.

“We don’t even know how much biomass we've or how much we consume,” he told Fortune.

According to Semaw, the roadmap's fate rests on political will, rigorous studies of the carbon market, and the integration of carbon finance within broader climate legislation.

“I don’t know if we can achieve this,” he said.

PUBLISHED ON Jul 06,2025 [ VOL 26 , NO 1314]