KOKO supports Government of Kenya's vaccine rollout

KOKO is pioneering a transformative energy solution that: 1) Protects forests by eliminating charcoal demand; 2) Fights climate change by making cooking carbon negative; 3) Protects family health by reducing exposure of women and children to Indoor Air Pollution. Indoor Air Pollution from dirty cooking fuel kills two million people annually, half are children under five. This is more than the combined death toll of malaria, TB, and HIV/AIDS.

Since the pandemic emerged last year, respiratory health has never been higher up the international health, political and news agenda. The threat of COVID-19 is not going away. However, the rollout of vaccination programmes around the world is crucial in enabling us all to return to some sort of normal life.

Therefore, in the second half of 2021, we have been supporting the Kenyan Ministry of Health in its efforts to make vaccines to COVID-19 as widely available as possible.

This has involved three separate vaccination days at our office locations: with the combination of KOKO staff members and the wider network our Agent partners (the ~700 shopkeepers who retail our products via KOKO Point Fuel ATMs), we wanted to ensure that we support as many of the people we directly engage as possible.

In Kenya, we have a team of approximately 500 employees, working between two Nairobi locations. Cooking fuel is a household staple, and its distribution is therefore essential. The nature of our business requires many of our team to work in busy settings, as we work hard to ensure the smooth operation of our network across Nairobi and grow our customer base. We wanted to offer all our employees and their families the opportunity to be safer through the provision of these highly effective vaccines.

Equally, we wanted to do our part for the wider community by contributing vaccines back to the Ministry of Health to be used to vaccinate more Kenyan citizens in general. As such, we donated the same number of vaccines to the Ministry of Health's wider campaign as we purchased for our team and network.

At KOKO, we put our team first, and thus the decision to participate in this private sector-led initiative was easy to make, enabling us to offer convenient access for all those who are interested in being vaccinated.