For the past 40 years, the dominant ‘policy’ on cooking energy in the Global South has been to improve the combustion efficiency of biomass fuels. This was said to alleviate the burdens of biomass cooking for three billion people by mitigating emissions, reducing deforestation, alleviating expenditure and collection times on fuels and increasing health outcomes. By 2015, international agencies were openly saying it was a failing policy. The dispersal of improved cookstoves was not keeping up with population growth, increasing urbanisation was leading to denser emissions and evidence suggested health effects of improved stoves were not as expected. A call was made for a new strategy, something other than ‘business as usual’. Conventional wisdom suggests that access to electricity is poor in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), that it is too expensive and that weak grids prevent even connected households from cooking. Could a new strategy be built around access to electricity (and gas)? Could bringing modern energy for cooking to the forefront kill two birds with one stone? In 2019, UK Aid announced a multi-million-pound programme on ‘Modern Energy Cooking Services’ (MECS), specifically designed to explore alternative approaches to address cooking energy concerns in the Global South. This paper outlines the rationale behind such a move, and how it will work with existing economies and policies to catalyse a global transition.

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Elsevier under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This paper aims to identify and understand the challenges that may confront the scaling up of a proposed battery electric cooking concept (Batchelor 2013), eCook, which offers the potential for emission free cooking, with time/money savings and broader environmental benefits from reduced fuelwood/charcoal consumption. By drawing on the literature on the transition to electric cooking in South Africa and more broadly, literature from across the Global South analysing the uptake of ICS (improved cookstoves), LPG (liquid petroleum gas) and solar home systems, this study identifies the factors (e.g. successful delivery models and marketing strategies) that have enabled these innovations to reach scale. This knowledge is then related to the eCook concept, by identifying the potential users of this promising technology and outlining potential marketing strategies, as well as a user-focused iterative design process, that will enable social enterprises to reach them. Uptake is predicted to be most rapid in hot climates where fuelwood/charcoal is purchased and low energy diets and low power cooking devices are the standard. Mobile enabled fee-for-service (utility) business models, the establishment of a service network, awareness raising campaigns on the benefits of clean cooking, female-focussed training programs and bundling eCook systems with locally appropriate appliances to enable productive activities are seen as key to reaching scale