KOKO's cheap cooking fuel ran on carbon credits — then Kenya blocked the credits

KOKO Networks was founded in Kenya in 2013 by Greg Murray to get low-income households off charcoal and kerosene. The offer was aggressive: bioethanol at KES 100 a litre against a market price of KES 200, and stoves at KES 1,500 against KES 15,000, dispensed through more than 3,000 automated refuelling machines. The difference between the price charged and the price of the fuel was paid by someone else — buyers of KOKO's carbon credits abroad.

It scaled: more than $100 million raised from investors including the Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund, a $179.6 million guarantee from the World Bank's MIGA barely a year before the end, and plans to add 3 million customers by December 2027. Then the model's one regulatory dependency snapped: the Kenyan government declined to issue the Letter of Authorisation KOKO needed to sell its carbon credits, and without that revenue the subsidies had no source.

On 30 January 2026, after two days of meetings in Nairobi, KOKO shut down and laid off its entire 700-person workforce, telling staff not to return the next day. About 1.5 million households faced a return to the fuels KOKO had been built to replace. The company's failure was not operational — the machines worked, the customers came — it was structural: a business whose unit economics required a signature the company could not sign.