ATMs for clean cooking fuel

Nairobi. A city pulsing with life. The Kenyan capital is a major city with international flair and over four million inhabitants. Streets are bustling, and many roads choked with traffic. A young man gets out of a bus and strolls across a busy marketplace. “Forget the shopping centres”, he says to the camera; “this is where money really moves”. He adds: “Digital is our new language, and mobile our new currency.” The scene is taken from an advertising film by KOKO Networks, an international tech company that was founded in Nairobi and is focused on delivering solutions that improve life in the world’s fastest-growing cities.

Under this overarching mission, KOKO’s first solution – KOKO Fuel – centres on innovations that reimagine the supply chain for a basic need: safe, affordable cooking fuel. Through a Network of over 600 Fuel ATMs, known as “KOKO Points”, which are installed inside local convenience shops, customers can buy clean bioethanol fuel in small quantities close to home, with major positive impact on family health and the environment.

Tanker routes managed via data cloud

This is Africa's largest deployment of IoT technology for consumer fuels, with cloud-based tracking of Fuel inventory across the supply chain: each "KOKO Point" is connected to the "KOKO Cloud" software platform, sending real-time updates – via a range of internal sensors – to a Network Operations Centre. At the same time, KOKO’s fuel distribution partner Vivo Energy Kenya sources molasses-based bioethanol fuel from local and regional suppliers, and delivers it to selected service stations it operates across Nairobi. These service stations have dedicated underground storage tanks for holding cooking fuel, with KOKO’s customized IoT hardware controlling the movement and tracking of fuel, first onto small fuel delivery trucks, and then during the last-mile distribution to the Fuel ATMs.

KfW subsidiary DEG – Deutsche Investitions- und Entwicklungsgesellschaft was an early supporter of the scheme, providing an interest-free loan of 500,000 euros under its Up-Scaling programme. As Dr. Tobias Bidlingmaier, Up-Scaling Team Leader at DEG, explains: “In this way, we help young companies to take their innovative business models to the next level”. He has no doubt that this model has a great future: “It creates jobs and offers shop owners a further source of income, while KOKO’s innovations and mission can be expanded to a range of other products and services that deliver value to urban consumers, retailers and suppliers.”

The advantages of bioethanol stoves

However, it is not only the business model that convinces Bidlingmaier; he is also struck by KOKO Fuel’s potential to deliver major positive social and environmental impacts: “Bioethanol is a clean cooking fuel that moves people away from deforestation-based charcoal and kerosene, both of which kill hundreds of thousands of people each year in Africa through indoor air pollution.” Indeed, diseases caused by the toxic fumes of dirty cooking fuels kill more each year than HIV, malaria and tuberculosis combined. So, while providing a huge improvement in convenience, affordability and cleanliness, bioethanol cooking saves lives.

On the environmental front, tackling the dominance of charcoal across Africa is a huge challenge. Charcoal consumption drives two million hectares of deforestation annually, and has wiped out one third of Africa’s forests in 30 years. The rate of environmental devastation only increases with urbanization, as people shift from using sustainably collected firewood rurally to deforestation-based charcoal in urban areas. Charcoal production leads to biodiversity loss, soil erosion, microclimate change, and ultimately lower agricultural productivity and food insecurity. As Bidlingmaier points out: „Replacing charcoal with any form of bioethanol – especially that produced in East Africa from molasses (a by-product of the sugar industry) – is therefore an important measure to preserve forests and endangered species.“ Solutions like KOKO have a crucial role to play in many emerging market cities of the future, as the world tries to ensure Healthy living conditions and Sustainable Energy for All under the UN goals.