KOKO Networks’ cookstove carbon credits in Kenya were “largely hot air”
“They would have taken everything that Kenya is entitled to.”
KOKO Networks’ bioethanol cookstove operations collapsed because the Kenyan government refused to issue a letter of authorisation for KOKO to sell compliance carbon credits under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, or the aviation industry’s Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA).
I wrote about the collapse of KOKO Networks last week:
On 1 February 2026, administrators from the accounting firm PwC assumed control of KOKO.
The Kenyan government has not yet made a formal statement about why it did not issue the letter of authorisation to KOKO.
But on 2 February 2026, David Ndii, economic adviser to Kenya’s President, William Ruto, commented on Twitter that
Koko’s case is uniquely multidimensional. The Paris Agreement itself, the veracity of cookstove carbon credits, our investor unfriendly NDC regime and carbon market regulations, transparency of Koko’s business model, diplomatic meddling . . .
Then Business Daily reported Kenya’s Trade Cabinet Secretary, Lee Kinyanjui, as saying on 3 February 2026 that Kenya did not issue the letter of authorisation because KOKO would end up using the entire share that Kenya could claim from global carbon markets.
“The business model did not align,” Kinyanjui said.
“In the tabulation of numbers, there was no concurrence because if Kenya gave in and authorised the numbers they were claiming, no other company in Kenya would have been able to claim. They would have taken everything that Kenya is entitled to.”
And on 7 February 2026, Ndii shared a post on LinkedIn written by Tom Price, who has worked on cookstove projects for eight years.
Price has also written a longer article, in which he describes KOKO’s clean cookstoves operation was “world class” and “a marvel of technology”. He writes that, “the stoves worked well, the fuel was clean and modern”.
Nevertheless, Price argues, KOKO was a “flawed carbon credit company”. KOKO’s leadership team “misled” customers, employees, lenders, and other partners.
“Hot air”
“The fatal flaw for Koko,” Price writes, “was the heart of their operation: how they counted carbon credits.” And Price concludes that, “Koko’s credits were largely hot air.”
Price explains that there are three questions that cookstove project developers have to ask in determining how many carbon credits their project generates:
How much of the wood or charcoal previously used in cooking came from a renewable source?
What kinds of cooking fuel was the customer using before getting your product?
How much does the customer use your product?
Price summarises how KOKO “colored way outside the lines on all three”:1
The fNRB (Non-Renewable Biomass) Rate: Koko used a 93% rate; the actual rate in cities like Nairobi is now 38%. This single metric overcredited them by 2.4X+, meaning that using the accurate number would have cut their claimed carbon credits from 15 million to less than half that.
Distorted Baselines: Koko claimed their urban customers used only charcoal previously (more than a ton per household per year!), ignoring widespread LPG use and other “fuel stacking” - again slashing their likely impact.
Inflated Use Numbers: Koko ran a high-tech walled garden — you could only fill your stove with their tanks, at their fuel ATMs, and all that data was captured in the cloud. They knew exactly how many liters of fuel every customer bought, to the decimal point. Yet, for carbon reporting, they ignored their own digital data and used a tiny number of surveys (their latest, in March 2023, talked to only 159 households out of almost 900K customers) to claim an average of 15+ liters per month, vastly boosting their claimable impact. If the reality demonstrated by fuel sales was higher, they would have used that, but they didn’t. That decision speaks for itself.
Carbon credit ratings agency BeZero gave KOKO’s carbon credits a “B” grade, meaning a low likelihood of actually achieving one tonne of CO₂e avoided or removed. And BeZero gave KOKO a “D” rating for carbon accounting, which is the lowest rating possible.
According to Price, Kenya’s National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) asked KOKO to use a more accurate fNRB (the fraction of woody biomass that is harvested unsustainably) and to base their calculations on exactly how much bioethanol actually sold.
KOKO refused.
Pervasive over-crediting
Price highlights a serious problem with KOKO’s cookstove project: over-crediting. It is, of course, a problem common to many carbon offsetting projects.
In January 2024, a paper in Nature Sustainability was published with the title, “Pervasive over-crediting from cookstove offset methodologies”.
One of the co-authors of the paper, Barbara Haya told Channel 4 that cookstove programmes are “claiming over six times the amount of climate benefits thatn they’re really achieving”.
Yet Price argues that this is not a “failure of regulation — it’s a sign that the system is finally working”. That really could only have been written by a true believer in the blind faith of carbon trading.
KOKO Networks issued almost 15 million carbon credits before collapsing. Gold Standard apparently had no problem with certifying KOKO’s hot air.
And around 1.5 million of KOKO’s ex-customers in Kenya are left with no bioethanol to put in their now useless cookstoves.
Price’s longer, more detailed, version of this is available here.