Access to affordable, reliable energy is the foundation many other issues depend on: public health, economic opportunity, education, climate resilience, and more. Understanding the global energy policy landscape – identifying critical gaps and emerging opportunities – is key for turning commitments into practical plans, with measurable progress.
We spoke with Nandi Mbazima, Senior Officer, Energy Intelligence at Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL), to hear how her team uses Climate Policy Radar (CPR) to map policy coverage, track commitments, and compare approaches across topics such as electricity access, renewable energy, and sustainable cooling. This includes finding that seven of the twenty countries with the largest clean cooking deficits have dropped or diluted quantified cooking commitments between earlier and later NDCs – reinforcing SEforALL's work engaging global leaders and securing the investment and international cooperation needed to change this.
With CPR, weeks of manual desk research now takes days, freeing Nandi’s team to focus on the analysis and advocacy required to close the energy access gap.
SEforALL has a global mandate to accelerate energy transitions in emerging and developing countries. But for those who are not familiar with your work, tell us what you do and why it matters.
Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL) is an international non-profit organisation working in partnership with the United Nations, governments, the private sector, and civil society to drive faster action towards achieving SDG 7 – ensuring access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all by 2030. Our CEO, Damilola Ogunbiyi, serves as the UN Secretary-General's Special Representative for Sustainable Energy for All and Co-Chair of UN Energy.
We work at the intersection of energy, climate, and development, in close collaboration with our partners, to improve energy access, decarbonise energy systems, and grow green industries. We advocate for policies that deliver on all three simultaneously, and support countries as they design and implement their energy transition pathways.
Within SEforALL, our Energy Intelligence team develops data-driven strategic insights that inform decision-making across the energy sector. We produce analysis and intelligence products that help governments, development partners, and investors understand where the gaps are and where the opportunities lie. It's within this programme of work that CPR has become a valuable tool.
How does your team use CPR in their day-to-day work?
Our team uses CPR as a research tool to understand the global policy landscape for electricity access, clean cooking, renewable energy, energy efficiency, and sustainable cooling. We use it to:
Map policy coverage across countries and regions, identifying which have enacted laws, policies, or strategies on specific energy topics – and which have not.
Analyse policy commitments to help track where countries are translating climate ambition into domestic energy legislation.
Benchmark and compare policy approaches across country peer groups, which bolsters our advisory work and helps countries learn from one another.
Support country engagement and advocacy work that we carry out, with more informed, evidence-based discourse and action.
With all of that in mind, what does CPR let you do that you couldn't before – or do more easily?
Previously, answering a question as simple as “which countries have legislated for clean cooking?” meant manually searching government websites, requesting documents through formal channels, or relying on secondary compilations of documents or data that are often out of date. CPR fundamentally changes this. The ability to run a semantic search across the full text of over 35,000 policy-related documents and receive results in seconds is transformative for our work. Also, where so much of the world's climate legislation is published in languages other than English, we'd often hit a wall there too – but CPR translates it automatically, so language is no longer a barrier to a comprehensive global analysis.
Could you share a specific example of analysis CPR has helped support?
It’s helping us develop data-driven intelligence products, starting with a series of stories on how open policy data can reveal gaps and opportunities in the global energy landscape. The first examines the clean cooking policy gap, mapping which countries have legislated for clean cooking and where the policy landscape is thinnest.
We conducted a systematic search of the CPR database across the twenty countries carrying the largest clean cooking access deficits. For each country we ran standard cooking queries, such as “clean cooking”, “cookstove”, and “household air pollution”, with supplementary searches for hyphenated variants (e.g. cook-stoves), and known instruments where the standard queries didn't surface them. Each country's strongest reference was then classified from Tier 1 (a standalone clean cooking law, regulation, or strategy) to Tier 5 (a passing mention).
The analysis revealed a clear gap: of the twenty priority countries we examined, only one has a dedicated standalone clean cooking strategy in CPR’s collection. For most others, clean cooking is addressed only within broader climate or energy instruments. This directly supports SEforALL's advocacy for stronger and more specific clean cooking legislation and investment globally.
Our findings reflect the documents currently in CPR’s index. For several of the large-deficit countries, relevant clean cooking instruments – particularly newer ones – may not yet be captured. That said, the scale of CPR’s collection provides a strong starting point, and any gaps in indexing only reinforce the case for its continued expansion.
The next piece will explore sustainable cooling policy and population vulnerability, cross-referencing CPR's data with our own Chilling Prospects research on populations at risk from a lack of cooling access. We see this series as an important contribution to our longer-term Energy Intelligence programme, demonstrating how open policy data can generate actionable insights for the energy sector.
Your intelligence series sounds like a compelling way to turn policy data into real-world impact. During the research process, was there anything that surprised you, or that challenged your thinking?
One of the most striking moments came as we tracked NDC content over time. Comparing earlier and later NDC submissions across the twenty countries, we found that seven of them had dropped or diluted their quantified clean cooking commitments. Ghana, for instance, removed its targets to raise LPG access to 50% and deploy two million efficient cookstoves by 2030. Tracking a shift of this kind across twenty countries and multiple NDC cycles would not have been feasible at this scale without CPR.
How does all of this support SEforALL’s overarching mission to close the energy gap?
We're still early in our use of CPR, but the efficiency gains are already significant. Research that would likely have taken weeks now takes days, freeing up capacity for analysis rather than data gathering. It’s also enabled us to plan a series of recurring intelligence products that would not have been feasible with manual research methods. The ability to re-run systematic searches at regular intervals means we can track progress over time and produce living, updatable products rather than one-off reports.
As this work continues, it can support several of SEforALL’s strategic priorities. It strengthens our evidence base for advocacy, enabling us to make data-backed claims about the state of energy policy globally. It helps inform country engagement, allowing us to develop a more detailed understanding of the existing legislative landscape. And it enhances the data-driven work we do to develop credible products for our external stakeholders and the wider public.
Is there anything else you'd like to share?
The clean cooking policy gap analysis is the first in what we intend to be an ongoing series of intelligence stories using CPR. Each one will build on the workflows and search taxonomies we've learned from the last, so the learning and methodology strengthens with every piece we publish. We see significant potential for deepening our use of the tool as it evolves. CPR provides genuine value in making the world’s climate policy landscape open, searchable, and understandable, and we are excited to see where it takes us next.
