Mirova announces financing for clean cooking company KOKO
The Mirova Gigaton Fund will enable KOKO to scale up a new type of residential energy utility across Kenya and Rwanda.
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Mirova, an affiliate of Natixis Investment Managers, has announced financing for KOKO, a clean-cooking solutions company.
Through a scalable carbon finance debt facility, the loan from the Mirova Gigaton Fund will enable KOKO to scale up a new type of residential energy utility across Kenya and Rwanda.
In sub-Saharan Africa, more than 850 million people depend on firewood and charcoal for cooking. These cooking methods release harmful pollutants, worsening the climate crisis and causing 3.7 million premature deaths each year due to smoke inhalation and indoor air pollution, disproportionately affecting women, children, and those in sub-Saharan Africa. A continent-wide energy transition toward clean and modern fuels is crucial to solving this problem.
KOKO is a key player in leading this transition, replacing demand for charcoal by supplying over 1.3 million homes in Kenya and Rwanda with sustainable bioethanol cooking fuel distributed through a dense network of high-tech KOKO Fuel ATMs located in thousands of corner stores. The resultant carbon revenues are shared with households as a non-government energy subsidy, enabling even the poorest households to switch.
"We are proud to support KOKO’s transformative bioethanol cooking fuel technology platform, which aligns perfectly with the Mirova Gigaton Fund’s focus on innovative solutions to tackle climate challenges in emerging countries. This investment aims to not only reduce emissions from cooking but also combat deforestation by decreasing dependence on charcoal. Through this partnership, we are advancing scalable, sustainable solutions for a greener future," said John Kimotho, investment director at Mirova Kenya.
"We are pleased to have an asset manager of Mirova’s calibre on board to support our continued impact. Solving the charcoal curse is one of the grand challenges of development, and leveraging compliance carbon markets to enable a non-government consumer energy subsidy is an idea whose time has finally arrived. We look forward to working together with the Mirova team for the long term," said Greg Murray, CEO and co-founder at KOKO.
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