On 28 April 2026, at Fabs Event Centre in Kano, over 2,000 households benefited from the clean energy empowerment program, an initiative of the National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI). This initiative forms part of NASENI’s broader Sustainable Empowerment Programme targeted towards improving access to clean and environmentally-friendly energy. In view of this, beneficiaries went home with clean cookstoves, solar home systems, and other energy tools. The Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, Jumoke Oduwole, who spoke at the event, described it as a demonstration of how Nigeria’s industrial and investment agenda was being translated into real outcomes for citizens.
It is a good day worth thinking carefully about, not because there is anything wrong with what happened, but because the story of clean cooking in Nigeria is much larger than 2,000 households in Kano, and how we frame it matters enormously.
The Problem Hiding in Plain Sight
Most conversations about infrastructure in Nigeria default to the same images — potholed expressway, absence of electricity, and collapsed bridge. These are real and urgent. However, there is another infrastructure failure happening in kitchens across the country that rarely gets the same attention.
Here is some context that rarely gets mentioned alongside stories like this:
- Nigeria has approximately 46 million households, and approximately 83% of Nigerians rely on solid biomass, like firewood, charcoal, and crop residue, for cooking
- The WHO estimates that household air pollution from open cooking fires causes roughly 98,000 deaths in Nigeria every year
- Women and children are the most exposed, spending the most time near the fire and the most time collecting fuel
- Households that rely on firewood and charcoal often spend a significant portion of their income on fuel. This accounts for money that could go toward food, school fees, or savings
This is a health crisis, an economic crisis, and an infrastructure crisis. The woman waking up at 5 am in Kano to light a fire before her children go to school is navigating an infrastructure failure as real as any power outage or broken road. The difference is that her problem does not make the evening news.
Calling It What It Is
There is a habit in Nigerian governance of framing energy access at the household level as charity or empowerment rather than as infrastructure delivery. NASENI’s own Executive Vice Chairman, Khalil Suleiman Halilu, stated that the initiative was geared towards improving beneficiaries’ quality of life, and helping them “do more, earn more, and live better.” These are all true and meaningful. However, there is a risk in the framing.
Clean cooking, treated as empowerment, invites applause. On the other hand, when it is treated as infrastructure, it invites accountability.
Infrastructure has a standard. It is supposed to be planned at scale, built to last, maintained over time, and accessible without depending on a distribution event at an event centre. When we call a cookstove a gift, we lower the bar. However, when we call it a public good that every Nigerian household deserves access to, we raise it.
The distinction matters because it changes what questions we ask from “how many people received stoves today?” to “what is the plan to ensure every household that needs one has access within a defined timeline?” Or “was the event successful?” to “is there a budget line, a regulatory framework, and an implementation structure behind this?”
The 2027 Question Nobody Is Asking
It raises a concern to look at a programme like this — launched in Kano, one of Nigeria’s most politically significant states, less than 250 days before a general election — without acknowledging the timing.
While both things can be true, a programme can be genuinely beneficial and also politically strategic. Governments everywhere tend to accelerate visible, direct-impact programmes as elections approach. Projects that impact the daily lives of people — a stove in the kitchen, a solar light for the children’s homework — carry a different kind of political weight than a highway that takes years to complete.
What is worth watching is whether programmes like this are part of a coherent long-term energy access strategy, or whether they are isolated moments of visibility that do not connect to anything sustainable. A good question to ask is whether NASENI or any government agency will be back in Kano in two years to check whether those cookstoves are still functioning, whether households have access to replacement parts, and whether the solar systems are still providing power.
If the answer is yes, this is infrastructure. Meanwhile, if the answer is no, it was only an event.
The Scale Problem
As stated earlier, Nigeria has an estimated 46 million households, and NASENI’s intervention reached over 2,000 of them. As a matter of fact, every programme starts somewhere, and 2,000 families experiencing cleaner air, lower fuel costs, and more reliable evening light is not a small thing. However, it is important to be honest about the ratio. Reaching 2,000 households when the need is measured in tens of millions means that, at this pace and scale, the problem does not get solved within any meaningful timeframe.
What would actually move the needle is a combination of factors, such as strong regulatory standards that require cleaner cooking fuels to be available and affordable at scale, subsidies structured around access rather than one-off distribution, and integration with the broader energy transition agenda that Nigeria claims to be pursuing. The Kano intervention is a data point, while a policy framework would be a destination.
On the question of funding, the available reports do not specify how much was spent on this particular programme. That transparency gap is itself worth noting. When public agencies distribute goods to thousands of citizens, the public deserves to know the cost per household, the total budget, where the funding came from, and how it was procured. Without that information, it is impossible to evaluate whether the spending was reasonable or scalable.
What This Moment Actually Signals
The woman cooking over a fire at 5 am in Kano is not waiting for an empowerment event; she is navigating a system that has not been built to serve her. Her kitchen is the last mile of Nigeria’s energy infrastructure failure, and it has been the last mile for decades.
While we recognise that NASENI showed up in Kano with cookstoves and solar panels, what matters more is whether this is the start of treating household energy access as infrastructure, demonstrated by the accountability, the funding, and the long-term planning that word implies or whether it was a very nice event on a Monday in April.
Time and the next government budget will tell us which one it was.