AFRICA: MCFA to deploy €16m for clean cooking from November 2023
The Modern Cooking Facility for Africa (MCFA) is announcing a new €16 million funding round. This second commitment will support access to environmentally-friendly cookstoves in several sub-Saharan African countries.
Access to clean cooking should accelerate in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe over the coming months. In any case, this is the aim of the new funding round recently launched by the Modern Cooking Facility for Africa (MCFA), a mechanism managed by the Nordic Environment Finance Corporation (NEFCO).
The new funding round, which starts in November 2023, “will further support the introduction and scale-up of modern cooking solutions to create long-term sustainable markets for these technologies in sub-Saharan Africa. Based on an external evaluation of the first round of MCFA funding, we are looking to provide more opportunities for clean cooking businesses by making a number of changes to the eligibility criteria and streamlining the application process,” explains Ash Sharma, Vice President of Nefco and head of the MCFA.
Access to clean cooking for 300,000 people
These changes will make “MCFA funding more accessible to start-ups”, he assures us. According to him, this new funding cycle will be divided into two funding windows combining results-based funding and catalytic grant funding. “The total funding available for the two windows will be €16 million, with individual tickets ranging from €500,000 to €2.5 million”, says the MCFA.
However, the funding mechanism will “only support higher-tier cooking solutions”, including electric stoves and stoves using sustainably produced solid and liquid biofuels or biogas solutions. The funding will also benefit companies providing more conventional solutions such as liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) cookstoves, mainly in the DRC, Malawi, Tanzania, Mozambique and Zambia.
This is the second round of clean cooking financing launched by the MCFA. Launched in 2022, the first round of financing saw six financing agreements signed in six countries, including Kenya. The aim of this initiative led by NEFCO is to accelerate access to clean cooking in Africa. At least 900 million people in sub-Saharan Africa still cook over wood fires or use toxic fuels to cook their food.
Cover photo: By AFRIK21
