A growing share of sub-Saharan Africa’s population lives in cities, and roughly half of these urban residents reside in informal settlements where polluting fuels, primarily charcoal, remain the dominant cooking sources. Increasingly, the clean cooking conversation is shifting to reflect this reality, with greater recognition that achieving universal access to clean cooking will require targeted strategies for low-income urban communities, where both the health risks of household air pollution and the opportunities for energy transitions are concentrated. As policymakers and funders look for ways to bring clean cooking to Africa’s urban poor, one key reality often goes unnoticed: Electric cooking is already happening in the continent’s informal settlements, just not in the way most people think.
Our fieldwork — conducted in December 2024 by a team of researchers from the e-GUIDE Initiative and the Technical University of Kenya — involved surveying roughly 500 households across five informal settlements in Nairobi. The goal was to better understand electricity’s evolving role in everyday energy use, particularly for cooking and boiling, in some of the city’s lowest-income communities. The findings reveal a quiet but growing shift: Households are using electricity not only for lighting and phone charging but also for boiling water to cook, make tea, bathe, and sterilize food and drinking water.
This growing adoption of “e-boiling” is emerging as the entry point for expanding electricity’s role in the household energy mix in these communities, offering new insights into how we can design equitable and inclusive clean cooking programs.
Life, Light and Boiling Water: Electricity in Nairobi’s Informal Settlements
Despite low incomes and overcrowded housing, the findings of our survey show that nearly nine in 10 households in Nairobi’s informal settlements have some form of electricity connection.
But there’s a catch: Most of these are informal hookups that are unapproved by the utility company or flat-out illegal — e.g., wires daisy-chained from a neighbor’s meter that allow nearby households to access their electricity for a fee, or flat-rate deals with a “wireman” who taps into and resells the utility’s electricity before it reaches household meters. But even in these settings, electricity is deeply integrated into daily life.
Nearly a third of connected households — whether they pay a utility for electricity, pay their neighbor for it, pay a wireman for it or don’t pay for it at all — already use electricity for cooking or boiling water. And among them, 95% rely on it primarily for boiling water, according to our (as yet unpublished) survey data. Among these households, about 60% use electricity to pre-boil water for cooking purposes, while about a quarter use it to cook food directly, while the other 15% pre-boil water for non-cooking purposes like treating drinking water and bathing.
Pre-boiling for cooking purposes entails boiling water with electricity, then transferring the water to a different stove to continue cooking food using other fuels such as charcoal, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) or kerosene. This approach is faster, cleaner and often cheaper, especially for households paying a flat monthly rate for their electricity, regardless of usage. For many, boiling a kettle of water to kick-start a pot of beans or to heat water for bathing is more than convenient — it saves time, reduces smoke exposure, and stretches their already limited budgets for charcoal, kerosene or LPG. An electric kettle can boil water in under five minutes, compared to about 18 minutes with charcoal.
Why E-Boiling Matters: The First Step in the Clean Cooking Transition
Electricity’s foothold in these communities often begins with a single appliance. Most households that cook with electricity own just one low-cost device — typically a kettle, heating coil or immersion rod. We found that electric kettles are the most common appliance, used by about 85% of households that pre-boil water for cooking. Others rely on electric coils (38%) or immersion heaters (26%), depending on what they can afford or find in local markets. For most households, these appliances are part of their everyday routines: Over 90% of users report boiling water with them every day or every other day.
Such simple activities have big implications. By boiling water with electricity, households are already shifting part of their cooking fuel stack toward cleaner energy.
The widespread use of electricity for boiling challenges the assumption that electric cooking is too costly or impractical for the urban poor. In fact, it shows that the clean cooking transition is already underway; it just looks different from what policymakers expect.
When Cost and Convenience Align
The affordability of electricity in informal settlements often hinges on payment arrangements. Many residents pay a fixed amount to a landlord, neighbor or community wireman rather than receiving a metered bill — in fact, our survey found that roughly 80% of households make these flat-rate payments. These informal wiremen are not utility employees. Rather, they are local technicians embedded in the settlement’s informal economy. They typically draw electricity either from a household with a legal metered connection or by tapping upstream of the meter altogether and redistributing it through improvised wiring networks for a fee. The former often operates in a regulatory grey area — where a metered customer informally extends their legitimately purchased power to neighbors and shares costs across multiple users. The latter, however, bypasses metering entirely and essentially involves stealing and reselling electricity from the utility. Both arrangements have emerged in response to insecure tenure, high connection costs and administrative barriers that limit low-income households’ access to formal service. This informal pricing system, while not officially sanctioned and sometimes enabled by the theft of grid electricity, effectively flattens energy costs and makes electricity attractive for predictable, daily tasks like boiling — often offering a lower cost than charcoal or kerosene.
Equally important, the upfront cost of these appliances is low. While high-quality electric cookers remain out of reach — with electric pressure cookers and induction cookers often priced at one to two times the average monthly income of the households we surveyed — basic electric kettles and immersion heaters cost less than $5. Their affordability makes them an easy entry point into electric cooking, even for low-income households. Their simplicity and portability also make them well-suited for small living spaces and shared kitchens.
In many settlements, neighbors even share these appliances, taking turns to use a communal kettle or immersion heater. Our survey found that about 20% of households that own an electric kettle, heating coil or immersion heater share it with one or two other households. These social innovations highlight how low-income communities creatively adapt technology to meet their needs, finding collective solutions even when formal systems leave them behind.
From E-Boiling to E-Cooking: The Next Leap Forward
The key question for clean cooking advocates is: How do we transition these households from e-boiling to full e-cooking?
We argue that pre-boiling water with electricity represents an important entry point for deeper integration of electricity into the household cooking practices of the urban poor, and could stimulate broader e-cooking adoption when supported by an enabling environment that ensures reliable, affordable power, safe, low-cost appliances and user awareness.
From our data, two clear enablers emerge: an electricity payment system that makes usage affordable and predictable, and the availability of low-cost appliances such as kettles, coils and immersion heaters that lower the financial barrier to entry. Together, these factors appear to be stimulating the adoption of electricity for everyday cooking tasks. However, we cannot yet speculate on how access to individually metered connections would alter household behavior or perceptions of the cost of electric cooking.
At the same time, scaling up e-boiling — and potentially e-cooking — could reshape the incentives of these informal service providers who currently provide electricity under flat-rate arrangements. These models have largely worked because household electricity demand has remained relatively low and predictable. If cooking-related loads increase substantially, informal providers may respond by raising fees, restricting appliance use, or limiting high-wattage devices to protect their margins or manage load constraints. In such cases, the agency of households to expand their use of electric cooking could be shaped or constrained by the terms of these informal agreements. Clean cooking advocates will therefore need to anticipate this possibility, ensuring that efforts to promote e-cooking are paired with payment structures and regulatory approaches that protect affordability while supporting higher, sustained electricity use.
What is also evident from our data is that grid infrastructure challenges could be a major barrier to the wide adoption of electric cooking in informal settlements. Frequent outages, poor voltage quality and safety risks shape household confidence in electricity as a dependable cooking fuel. Full electric cooking will depend on higher-power devices that require a stable, high-quality and safe electricity supply that most households simply don’t have yet.
Our field data underscore the scale of these constraints. More than 70% of the households that pre-boil water for cooking reported experiencing power outages while boiling water — disruptions that could discourage reliance on electricity for more demanding cooking tasks. Voltage problems are even more pervasive: Our power-quality tests found that about 70% of households experienced voltage levels below regulatory standards, and over a third reported appliance damage from power surges. Safety concerns add another layer of risk — our wiring assessments revealed that nearly 80% of households lacked grounded connections, exposing users to electric shocks and making them hesitant to operate high-wattage appliances like e-boiling devices.
Overcoming these challenges will require us to meet households where they are, rather than designing programs for where we wish they were. That means improving grid reliability and promoting durable, low-cost appliances. It also means acknowledging informal connections as part of the real urban energy landscape — not as an exception to it — and working with communities to address the structural barriers that limit low-income households’ access to formal service, aligning formal systems with the realities of how people live and use electricity.
Rethinking Clean Cooking Policy for the Urban Poor
In urban areas, electric cooking interventions and campaigns currently primarily target middle-class households that can afford electric pressure cookers or induction stoves. But this focus risks leaving behind millions of the urban poor living in informal settlements.
Our experience from Nairobi is clear: Electricity is already part of the clean cooking solution in these settings. Policies and programs can take a few practical steps to build on what is already working by:
- Recognizing e-boiling as a legitimate and scalable entry point into electric cooking.
- Supporting affordable appliance markets, including safe and efficient electric kettles and small electric cookers.
- Collaborating with utilities to regularize informal connections safely, rather than simply criminalizing them.
- Using data from informal settlements to inform energy planning, ensuring that policies and strategies reflect how people actually use power in resource-constrained environments.
These types of approaches can enable governments and development partners to design more inclusive e-cooking strategies that accelerate real-world adoption, shifting their focus from trying to influence behavior change to creating an enabling environment that organically encourages it.
A Call to Action
If we want universal access to clean cooking by 2030, we must broaden our definition of progress. In Nairobi’s informal settlements, the clean energy transition is not a distant goal; it’s happening every time someone plugs in a kettle.
Recognizing and building upon this foundation could help millions of low-income households leapfrog directly into cleaner, more efficient energy use, one boiling pot at a time.
It’s time for clean cooking programs to look beyond the meter and see the innovation already at work in the world’s most underserved communities.
June Lukuyu is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington; Nathan Williams is an Associate Teaching Professor at Carnegie Mellon University Africa; Vongaishe Mutatu is a Ph.D. student at Columbia University; Austine Owuor Otieno is a Lecturer at the Technical University of Kenya; Paul Kyoma Asiimwe is an Assistant Lecturer at Makerere University; Vijay Modi is a Professor at Columbia University
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