Most carbon finance in Africa is directed at clean-cooking projects, despite the continent’s endowment with natural resources that could be utilized for more profitable pollution-offset ventures, Rwanda’s environment minister said.

The drive to transition about 1 billion people across Africa who still primarily cook on wood or charcoal fires to using cleaner forms of energy has been an easy target for developers. The burning of fossil fuels produces climate-warming emissions and carbon monoxide, a toxin that’s a major contributor to shortening half a million Africans’ lives each year.

Offset programs have included the introduction of more efficient stoves that run on other fuels, such as liquefied petroleum gas or even electricity. They aim to earn carbon credits, which each represent one ton of carbon dioxide or its equivalent either removed from the atmosphere or prevented from entering it in the first place, and can be sold to emitting industries — or in some cases countries — to offset their own emissions.

“We know that clean cooking matters deeply. It improves health, reduces pressure on forests, and creates real social value,” Bernadette Arakwiye, Rwanda’s environment minister, said at a carbon markets conference in the country’s capital Kigali on Wednesday, “But Africa’s ambition cannot stop there. We need carbon finance that also reaches the large-scale renewable energy, electric mobility, sustainable waste management, industrial decarbonization” projects, she said.

Africa produces a tiny fraction of the world’s greenhouse gases, but its vast forests and rollout of renewable energy offer potential to generate carbon credits and are increasingly being seen by governments as a source of revenue. Already countries including Singapore and Switzerland have sought to buy the offsets from Africa, as have airlines and other emitting industries.

“Our markets remain too concentrated in interventions that are easier to measure, easier to finance, and easier to sell,” Arakwiye said, noting that Rwanda derives 87% of its carbon income from cookstove projects. “We must now broaden that frontier.”She noted that agriculture, the sector most Africans depend on for their livelihoods and potentially one of the largest sources of carbon offsets, has generated barely 1% of credits issued on the voluntary market over the past two decades.

African governments should seek to diversify into offset projects with higher returns so it can have a wider portfolio of potential exports, according to Perumal Arumugam, a manager in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s mitigation division.

Even so, investment in stoves and related infrastructure hit $770 million in sub-Saharan Africa in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency.

BURN Manufacturing has sold 7 million more-fuel-efficient stoves across 12 African markets, earning as much as $30 per credit. It has been using the revenue to subsidize the cost of additional stoves by about 75%, helping it move 250,000 units monthly, and it aims to provide 1 billion people with clean cooking alternatives by 2050.

The debate about clean cooking is focused on Africa, with the conversation centering around carbon removal, electric vehicles and solar elsewhere in the world, according to Chris McKinney, BURN’s chief commercial officer.

“These are all good things. But cooking emits as much every year as the whole aviation sector or the whole shipping sector. It’s this huge,” he said. The provision of clean-cooking alternatives is “by far the most affordable climate low-hanging fruit for Africa. This is where all of the climate funding should be going, and not only is it great for climate change, but just incredibly important for people’s health,” he added.