Mente Foundation launches Project Green Flame, its first clean cooking initiative

Abuja, Nigeria — 20 July 2026

Mente Foundation today launched Project Green Flame, its first clean cooking initiative, installing clean cookstoves at Mother Theresa Children's Home in Abuja and funding the fuel that powers them.

It is a deliberately small beginning to a deliberately large ambition: to build the evidence and the local capacity to advance clean cooking at scale, starting in Nigeria and reaching across Africa.

The problem it confronts is vast and deadly. Across Africa, around a billion people still cook without access to clean cooking. In sub-Saharan Africa, that's roughly four in every five households.

They cook over firewood, charcoal and open flames, and the smoke that fills their kitchens is one of the world's great silent killers.

Worldwide, household air pollution is linked to close to three million deaths a year, including more than 300,000 children under the age of five — driving pneumonia in children and COPD, heart disease, stroke and lung cancer in adults.

Because it is women and children who spend the most time by the fire, they carry the heaviest burden.

The harm does not stop at the kitchen door: dirty cooking strips the continent's forests and drains money families and institutions can ill afford — in Nigeria alone, well over a billion US dollars a year goes up in smoke.

From day one, the Foundation is measuring the difference the switch makes: how much cleaner the air becomes, how much fuel is used, whether and how much the home saves and how well the stoves hold up in daily use.

Nothing is assumed; everything is tested. That evidence is the point. It is what will separate what genuinely works from what merely sounds good and it is what will guide how the Foundation extends clean cooking to the next home and the next institution — first across Nigeria and in time — across the continent.

The Foundation has chosen to begin where the need is sharpest: an institution caring for vulnerable children, whose developing lungs are most at risk from cooking smoke and where every naira saved on fuel is a naira returned to their care.

The encouraging truth is that this is among the most solvable challenges of our time and solving it delivers far more than cleaner air. International bodies including the International Energy Agency estimate that closing Africa's clean cooking gap could prevent millions of premature deaths, give women and girls back hours of every day, protect forests and create hundreds of thousands of permanent jobs across the value chain — in fuel supply, servicing, retail and local manufacturing.

Clean cooking is not only a health mission; it is a jobs, dignity and local-economy mission too.

In Nigeria, the National Clean Cooking Policy and a growing push to turn policy into delivery are creating the conditions for real programmes on the ground. Mente Foundation's mission answers that call — not with another policy paper but with a real kitchen, in a real home, cooking real meals.

"Nearly a billion people across Africa still cook in ways that quietly damage their health, their finances and their environment. Cooking smoke is one of the great silent killers of our time and it falls hardest on women and children. That is exactly where a foundation like ours should put its energy. We are starting in Nigeria, in one children's home, because real change begins somewhere real and measurable but our ambition is Pan-African. Project Green Flame is the first step of many." — Tolu Osekita, Founder, Mente Energy and Chair, Mente Foundation

"How a children's home cooks affects both the air children breathe and the money left for their care. We chose to begin at Mother Theresa Children's Home because the need is immediate and the difference can be measured. Our goal is simple: prove an approach here that can be repeated in institutions right across Nigeria and beyond." — Fisayo Balogun, Director, Mente Foundation

"Open fire cooking with charcoal feeds over 100 million Nigerians today but it also feeds the lungs and blood vessels with diseases we will have to fight tomorrow. Feeding is an essential component of living; it is a bit ironic that in trying to live, we pay with our lives later on. We must all advocate for cleaner energy." — Dr Kingdom Perelade, Medical Doctor, African Medical Centre of Excellence (AMCE)

"We are deeply grateful to Mente Foundation for choosing to launch their campaign with Mother Theresa's Children's Home. Their generous support will have a meaningful impact in our home, making daily life easier, healthier and more sustainable for both our staff and children. On behalf of our staff and all the children of the home, thank you for your generosity, and for supporting the work we do." — Catherine Emeagwali, Managing Director, Mother Theresa's Children's Home

About Mente Foundation

Mente Foundation is the not-for-profit arm of Mente Energy Limited, a clean energy company operating across Nigeria, Ghana and the UK.

The Foundation works to widen access to clean, sustainable energy for underserved communities — beginning with clean cooking for the homes and institutions that care for the most vulnerable.

Media Contact

Abiola Adekunle, Mente Foundation — mentefoundation@mente.energy