KOKO launches Showrooms across East Africa

Demonstration sites help accelerate government agreements on enabling policy

Unlocking foreign investment into a large-scale renewable cooking fuel utility requires an enabling policy environment, not dissimilar to the baseline policy required to unlock investment into large-scale clean power plants.  

We estimate that there are over 300 million households in over 60 countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America who can afford to subscribe to our clean fuel and carbon platform.  With the Kenyan business now serving over 350,000 households and scaling rapidly, we are naturally thinking about expansion into new countries, and attempting to respond to the influx of enquiries from governments and prospective partners in those markets.

To support discussions with policymakers and prospective partners on the enabling policy environment required, last year we commenced rollout of KOKO Showrooms across East Africa.

A KOKO Showroom is a demonstration site involving 50 households and a KOKO Point Fuel ATM inside a staffed urban outpost, which includes multimedia briefing material on the KOKO Fuel solution operating at scale in Kenya.  We use the Showrooms in discussions with a wide range of relevant stakeholders who seek to touch and feel the KOKO Fuel solution in action in their own environment, without the need to fly to Kenya.

In recent months we set up Showrooms in Kigali (Rwanda), Kampala (Uganda), and Zanzibar (Tanzania), all of which are in countries experiencing major negative impacts of the dirty cooking fuel crisis.  We plan to continue the rollout of KOKO Showrooms during 2022 to help support policy engagement with prospective host countries.

Supportive policy unlocks private climate finance

All energy industries rest upon four key foundations: 1) Customised Technology; 2) Customised Infrastructure; 3) Customised Policy and 4) Institutional Capital.

Solving the dirty cooking fuel crisis with KOKO Fuel is no different.  KOKO has built the Customised Technology platform.  Customised Infrastructure for our solution exists at scale through partnering with the downstream liquid fuels industry.  Institutional Capital is available at scale in response to strong risk-adjusted returns.  The final building block is Customised Policy, which is where progressive, development-oriented governments can play a material role in solving the crisis.

We look forward to continuing our strong and encouraging engagements with governments who seek to play a proactive role in unlocking private climate finance through implementing policies that level the playing field with deforestation-based charcoal.