Keeling Curve

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Project Summary / Description:

Despite decades of well-intentioned public sector initiatives, most households in sub-Saharan African cities continue to cook with deforestation-based charcoal. Charcoal consumption drives 2 million hectares of deforestation per annum and has wiped out a third of Africa‚ natural forest cover over the last 30 years, leading to soil erosion, microclimate change, and worsening food security. The charcoal industry delivers 1 billion tons of GHG emissions.

Solving the dirty cooking fuel crisis requires a fuels solution that can scale quickly with commercial capital, into even the poorest segments. Fossil LPG operates commercially in high-income brackets but is unable to scale to the mass market without large sustained government subsidies, which are not available.

KOKO Networks provides an innovative cooking solution through novel fuel distribution technology. The customer experience is modern, clean, ultra-safe, and delivers material savings to household budgets. After 5 years of research and development, including building high-tech manufacturing facilities in Kenya and India and writing enabling legislation, the first Network was rolled out in September 2019 and scaled rapidly. Our approach tackles the whole ecosystem ‚ the product & service, the supply chain and delivery, purchase and fulfilment.

We retail clean fuel to over 1,070,000 homes in urban Kenya, including nearly 30% of all homes in the greater Nairobi metropolitan area, and are growing our household subscriber base by over 10,000 new homes per week.

We manufacture, distribute and retail a high quality two-burner cooker that runs safely and efficiently on bioethanol fuel sourced both domestically and regionally in the East African market.  To enable low-cost fuels logistics, we have an infrastructure partnership with Vivo Energy, which owns and operates Shell-branded fuel stations across Kenya.

KOKO customers purchase clean fuel via a network of smart, IoT-enabled fuel ATMs (called KOKO Points) installed inside local convenience shops owned by shopkeeper partners. The customer experience is modern, clean, ultra-safe and undercuts charcoal pricing by an average of 40%; providing up to 50% savings to the typical Kenyan household cooking fuel budget.

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How Project Affects Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions:

Charcoal consumption drives 2 million hectares of deforestation annually, leading to soil erosion, microclimate change, and worsening food security. A transformative, sustainable solution enabling a complete shift from charcoal to renewable fuel is necessary.

Bioethanol is a 100% renewable fuel produced from agricultural feedstock that does not result in long-term GHG emissions to the atmosphere. KOKO enables users to transition to renewable bioethanol from non-renewable charcoal, thereby eliminating GHG emissions associated with charcoal production and consumption in urban and peri-urban areas. 

Switching households from charcoal to ethanol delivers major emissions reductions. KOKO currently serves over 1 Million Kenyan households  - a significant contribution towards countries’ quest to mitigate climate change.  A recent independent report (Dalberg, 2018) noted that a robust ethanol cooking industry in Kenya alone could deliver >10% of Kenya’s “Paris 2030” emissions reduction targets, without requiring any government funding.  Governments across the continent are now taking notice of the opportunity to grow ethanol cooking.

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KOKO‚ customer base is 80% female, a trend we expect to continue as operations expand to new regions. As primary cooks, women disproportionately bear the negative impacts of dirty fuel use including safety risks, health challenges, and lost productively. According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 4 million premature deaths occur each year due to household air pollution from inefficient cooking practices using polluting stoves and dirty fuels. This is more than the combined death toll of malaria, TB, and HIV/AIDS. In Africa, 600,000 people a year die from exposure to fumes generated from polluting fuels used for cooking and heating, the majority of whom are women and children.

The COVID-19 pandemic further exasperated these challenges. Air pollution is a known risk factor for many chronic diseases that are often determinants of the severity and impact of the COVID-19 virus in patients.

KOKO‚ solution is rated Tier 5 (best-in-class) for emissions (carbon monoxide / fine particulate matter), safety, and efficiency according to ISO standards, delivering no indoor air pollution. 

KOKO‚ model creates opportunities for women‚ empowerment. Our products reduce cooking time and drudgery for female household members and lead to increased discretionary time, increased sharing of tasks with men, and increased perception of well-being. Our existing gender strategy is being updated to align with the Gold Standard gender methodology and the W+ methodology on Time-Saving Domestic Energy. Our detailed gender analysis will differentiate how men and women, separately and together, contribute to and benefit from climate security and sustainable development (towards adaptation and mitigation or both) through KOKO‚ operations. This study will inform the design of our project aims and indicators.

Generally, given our field intelligence and interactions with experts so far, we expect to focus our efforts and monitoring around the following goals:

- Reduction in cooking time for female household members
- Increased control of finances and decision-making by women
- Improved status in the community of women
- Boost to productivity and educational opportunity of female household members
- Female employment and entrepreneurship in the KOKO value chain

The increasing demand for KOKO fuel has enabled investment into sustainable local bio-ethanol processing, creating new rural jobs & improving farmer incomes. KOKO has already created 700+ clean energy jobs in Kenya. Our team is very youthful, with 95% of employees under 35yrs. KOKO prioritises the training and promotion of young talent. We also seek to empower a new generation of societal leaders in Sub-Saharan Africa around the clean energy transition.

Taken together, KOKO unites low-income urban consumers, SMEs, rural farmers, host country governments, + multinational partners in a massively scalable positive feedback mechanism on clean energy + climate action, without requiring scarce public funding.

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