In this blog, Wairimu Gathimba argues that Koko Networks’ recent closure in Kenya exposes how clean cooking initiatives and other carbon offset projects always exploit the structural underdevelopment of Global South communities while failing to address the political and economic conditions that produce ‘dirty’ cooking in the first place.

The closure of Koko Networks at the beginning of February 2026 elicited an interesting range of reactions in the country. Some cast suspicion on the Kenyan government, claiming that the company was denied the letter of authorization (LoA) because it refused to pay rent to the political class. Others took on a more sympathetic view of the government, remarking that Koko’s closure should indicate to climate investors that the country is “high integrity not high yield” and that national interest precedes developer profit.

Koko Networks, which was founded in 2013 and launched its first network of bioethanol fuel ATMs in 2019, folded its operations on 31st January 2026, announcing the move through a brief message sent to customers. Shortly afterwards, on 3rd February 2026, Trade CS Lee Kinyanjui stated that Koko was denied the LoA because it sought to claim Kenya’s entire carbon credit allocation in the compliance carbon markets. Two days later, Tom Price, founder and former president of EcoSafi—a clean cooking company that operates in Kenya and Uganda—wrote a LinkedIn post claiming that Koko’s carbon credits were flawed but that ultimately, the company’s closure was “a silver lining for carbon integrity”, and that the Government of the Republic of Kenya was simply doing its job in trying to ensure that its carbon credits were of as high quality as their other exports including tea and coffee. Indeed, Kenya has positioned itself as a hub for carbon finance. At COP 27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, President Ruto referred to carbon offsets as the country’s “next significant export.” At the same conference, Kenya became one of the seven pioneer countries to sign on to the Africa Carbon Markets Initiative, which seeks to scale carbon credit production via voluntary carbon market activation plans.

KOKO Networks belongs to a long line of ineffective carbon offset projects

Carbon offsets fund projects that either sequester CO2 (that is, remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it), or lower carbon emissions. Such projects typically include renewable energy initiatives, energy efficiency projects such as clean cookstoves, reforestation, waste and landfill management, and carbon storing agricultural practices. The origins of carbon offset projects go all the way back to the 1980s. In 1989, amid a severe drought in the United States that pushed global warming to the front pages for the first time, American utility and power generation company Applied Energy Services (AES) devised the idea that to reduce the emissions generated by its coal-powered plant in Connecticut, it could plant trees around the plant to absorb the carbon emitted by the coal-powered plant. Except for one problem. It would be impossible to plant 52 million trees in the densely populated area of Connecticut where the plant was located, which is the number of trees that was calculated as necessary to absorb the carbon emitted by the plant. But since the atmosphere was a global common, AES executive Sherly Sturges proposed that the trees could simply be planted elsewhere. Thus, AES initiated the first land-based carbon project where they would support an agroforestry project in Guatemala, planting 52 million trees over the course of 10 years with an expected 16 million tons of carbon sequestered.

Sturges’ idea caught the world’s attention. In October 1988, a Times Magazine headline referred to the AES’ carbon offset project as an “Antidote for a Smokestack”, and in the article, the planting of 52 million trees in Guatemala vs the coal-powered plant in Connecticut was said to form a “healthy environmental equation.” Over the next decade, the practice of carbon offsetting came to be enshrined in international climate treaties such as the 2005 Kyoto Protocol, which introduced the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) that allowed “developed” countries to meet emission reduction targets by investing in emissions reduction projects in “developing” nations. However, in the years that followed, demand from compliance markets reduced, leaving leftover supply in the CDM’s carbon offset schemes. From this leftover supply, a market for voluntary carbon trading emerged. Alongside the UN’s carbon system, other sources of accreditation such as the Gold Standard (2003), American Carbon Registry (2007), and Verra (2007) were established. Demand for carbon offsets, however, went back up after the 2015 Paris Agreement, as major corporations pledged to achieve carbon neutrality and help meet the goal of limiting the global temperature increase to 1.5C.

The effectiveness of carbon projects, however, has largely been questioned. Developers often inflate their project’s impact. The AES carbon project, for example, only offsets about 10% of its targeted emissions. The project failed as food shortages arose from the enormous quantities of land set aside for forestry causing arguments to break out between farmers, some who simply began refusing to plant trees. Cookstove projects in particular have been found to have an average offset achievement ratio of 10.8%. It is extremely difficult to measure the amount of atmospheric carbon reduced by most carbon projects. First, projects must prove additionality, which means that they must have a project baseline that is an estimate of how much carbon would have been emitted had the project not existed—what, as journalist Heidi Blake writes, is a counterfactual that is nearly impossible to prove. In cookstove carbon projects, emissions reductions are calculated by assessing adoption, usage, and stacking rates—where adoption refers to the percentage of efficient stoves in use, usage to the number of meals cooked on the stove, and stacking to the percentage of meals cooked on the project stove relative to baseline stoves. These calculations also rely on the fraction of non-renewable biomass (fNRB)—that is, the proportion of woody biomass used as fuel that exceeds a landscape’s natural regeneration rate—as well as estimates of baseline fuel consumption. In the case of Koko Networks, as Price points out, the company allegedly overestimated the fraction of non-renewable biomass (using 98% instead of 38%), relied on a distorted fuel baseline that assumed users previously cooked primarily with charcoal (despite 67.2% of households in Nairobi—where Koko was expanding most rapidly—using LPG), and reported inflated usage figures.

Ultimately, most of those who support the government’s decision to deny Koko the LoA attribute the issue to the “integrity” of carbon credits that Koko networks used. Others, as previously noted, criticize the government’s callousness and lack of consideration for the 1.3-1.5 million households (a likely inflated figure) and the 700 jobs that were lost. These customers and employees may be the latest victims of carbon offset projects, which often mobilize the realities of Global South residents—such as the urgent need for clean cooking solutions in Kenya—to justify financial flows that ultimately enrich corporations and their intermediaries. Communities whose land is managed by the Northern Rangelands Trust under the Northern Kenya Grasslands Carbon Project (NKCP) for instance, received $234,000 from the sale of carbon credits that are estimated to have sold for somewhere between $21 million and $45 million.

Carbon projects are Social-ecological fixes

Carbon projects function as socio-ecological fixes—that is, interventions that “directly engage with and resolve, mitigate, or postpone a structural impediment—including any environmental one—to sustained capital accumulation.” This concept draws from Marxist geographers such as David Harvey, who argue that capital, in its pursuit of infinite expansion, is shaped by internal and structural contradictions that constantly have it looking for fixes. These contradictions then become inscribed in the material world which offers temporary “fixes” for capital to continue its expansion. Africa, for example, was incorporated into the global capitalist economy through colonialism, which alleviated crises of overproduction and underconsumption by opening new markets and providing access to cheaper raw materials. These new geographies also functioned as what Harvey calls a “spatial fix,” as the construction of infrastructure enabled the productive absorption of overaccumulated capital.

While the contradictions mentioned above are built around the social relations of capital, a second set emerges around the ecological contradictions of capitalism. Capitalism, as geographer James Moore has argued, is an ecological regime whose expansion is dependent on nature-based processes that it cannot reproduce. Limits arise in the capacity of the planetary ecosystem as a source of material inputs and a sink for unwanted by-products such as carbon emissions. Production under such conditions creates an unbalanced relationship between production and the natures that sustain it, generating a “metabolic rift.” In its quest for infinite expansion, capitalism dematerializes the economy, abstracting it into exchange values while obscuring the material ecological foundations upon which it depends. The result is an underproduction of the ecological conditions necessary for continued accumulation. Yet the recognition of the use-value of ecosystem “services,” such as carbon sequestration or technologies of decarbonisation has not curtailed this logic. Instead, it has expanded the terrain on which capitalist actors can assign exchange value to include decarbonisation services; presenting these services as “fixes” that permit continued extractive production while also opening up new frontiers for accumulation.

Through such ecological fixes, capital is simply looking to take advantage of crises/socio-natures of its own making to enhance profitability. In Kenya and other Global South contexts, these crises are rooted in their colonial formations. As Frantz Fanon observed, colonial economies were not integrated into a unified national economy; development occurred primarily in zones of extraction and white settlement, while other regions were left structurally underdeveloped. Post-independence, the Kenyan government sought to address the human and physical capital deficits inherited from colonial rule. Colonial investment had been highly selective, concentrated primarily in agricultural zones occupied by Europeans. Because of the limited participation of Africans in the colonial economy, the depletion of public coffers due to World War shocks, and the costs of the Emergency period, Kenya could not rely on significant domestic savings. Like many other Global South states, it turned to debt financing. The government took on ambitious development plans, promoting import-substitution industrialization. As a result, Kenya’s industrial sector averaged an annual growth rate of 9.5% between independence in 1963 and 1979 and expanded its output by three and a half times.

Simultaneously, the state pursued an aggressive rural development program aimed at ensuring that “people as a whole can participate in the development process.” This growth trajectory was disrupted by the sharp rise in global interest rates triggered by the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, the oil shocks of the 1970s, the Global North inflation that followed, the corrective Volcker reforms of 1979, and the ensuing Third World debt crisis. Under the Bretton Woods system, the US had promised monetary stability pegged to the dollar, which was in turn backed up by gold. Underlying this arrangement was the promise that the US would maintain enough gold reserves to back up world trade in dollars. In the period following the independence of the Global South however, demand for dollars skyrocketed as newly independent countries sought foreign investment for their industries and infrastructure, as well as foreign aid. Additionally, the financing of wars such as the Vietnam War called for an injection of US dollars into the global economy. Thus, dollar demand was higher than the amount of gold required to back it up, creating an increasing consensus that the dollar was overvalued, causing periodic runs on the dollar, and “undermining the nation’s foreign trading position.” To fix this, Richard M. Nixon applied what famously came to be known as the “Nixon shock” in August 1971, suspending dollar convertibility into gold and effectively devaluing the dollar.

Since the price of oil was quoted in dollars, the depreciation of the dollar reduced revenues for oil-producing countries, to which they responded by building a 2.5% annual inflation factor into the dollar price of oil in the Tehran Agreement of 1971. It is important to note that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was created in 1960 by Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia as an expression of nationalism, and that the proximate cause of its creation was the reduction of the price of Arabian crude oil by Esso Petroleum. In January 1972, OPEC called for a further 8.49% increase in the dollar price of oil to match a corresponding percentage increase in the price of gold relative to the US dollar. Then came the Yom Kippur War, during which the OPEC embargo on the United States raised the price of oil from $4.31 to $10.11. While the embargo was lifted by March 1974, oil prices remained high. These prices —and for many foodstuffs and other primary commodities—were passed through to final product prices with average annual increases of domestic prices in the Global North in the range of 7–8 percent in the 1970s. “Stagflation” became the descriptor of the prevailing economic environment.

In the same ‘70s, increased oil revenues for OPEC countries were deposited into Western banks such as Chase and Citibank. Unable to figure out where to invest the money, these banks sent out agents around the world convincing the leaders of newly independent countries who were taking on ambitious development plans to take out dollar-denominated loans to finance their plans. While the interest rates for these loans were favourable for that period, they were to increase dramatically following the Volcker shock of 1979. Frustrated by the persistent inflation of the 1970s, U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker increased U.S. short-term interest rates (on which most external debt contracts were based) from 9.5 percent to 16 percent. Global South states found themselves in three problems: the cost of servicing their dollar-denominated debts increased by an estimated 7-8% of export earnings, the cost of importing oil went even further up (in the first oil shock of 1974, the oil import bill of non-oil producing African countries had gone up from $516 million in 1972 to $2,063 million in 1974) while their ability to earn from exports was weakened by the recession in the Global North markets. IMF structural adjustment programs subsequently reversed many of the developmental strategies that had been pursued under proposals such as the New International Economic Order, approved at the 1974 UN General Assembly. In Kenya, like elsewhere in Africa, domestic industries collapsed, and state investment in human capital declined. The rollback of the state, the contraction of the formal industrial sector, and rapid demographic expansion — compounded by rural to urban migration — pushed large swaths of the population into the informal economy as a means of survival. It is among these precarious communities that clean cooking initiatives like Koko intervene.

As socio-ecological fixes, solutions promoted by actors such as Koko function as frugal innovations that “emphasize the ‘co-creation’ of affordable, accessible and aspirational products through active collaboration between formal and informal actors.” The informal economy—representing approximately 85 percent of employment in Sub-Saharan Africa—has evolved into a space of both survival and accumulation. As Julia Elyachar argues, “informality has become too central … to be relegated to the sphere of negative phenomena—the not formal.” Driven by the desire to penetrate new markets in “emerging economies”, corporations have in the last two decades grown increasingly interested in African informal spaces. Innovations such as M-PESA have subsequently been borne of corporations integrating informal economy practices such as Kenyans sending airtime to others via mobile phone as a means of transferring money. Carbon finance, newly directed towards the continent, follows the same trajectory at the level of “frugal innovations”: initiatives such as Koko Networks work with retail traders to set up fuel ATMs at sites with already established footfall, promising “disruption” and “inclusion”. In doing so, Koko works with “found institutions”, and harnesses their networks to construct low-cost, workable economic arrangements that disproportionately benefit the company over the communities it claims to serve. Koko Networks, for instance, claimed to subsidize their cooking stoves from $115 to $12.Yet Richard Mbidyo has pointed out that these were simple, mass-produced units from Indian factories whose base price was artificially inflated to shape carbon pricing calculations. Carbon pricing typically reflects an interplay of market forces (supply and demand), estimates of avoided damage (in this case, Koko’s claims about reducing non-renewable biomass use), and the developer’s reported costs—creating incentives to inflate baseline prices.

Koko’s supposed subsidy isn’t an act of philanthropy meant to help users who would have otherwise incurred health damage from burning charcoal, but a way for Koko to capture carbon revenues from the international market by exaggerating the cost of avoided emissions, and to capture domestic fuel markets. Moreover, Koko fuel reportedly costs users between Ksh 80 and Ksh 100 per day, amounting to over Ksh 2,000 per month—more expensive than a monthly refill of a 6kg LPG cylinder, which averages around Ksh 1,200. Rather than addressing informality as a condition of structural vulnerability, companies such as Koko treat it as a reservoir of labor, networks, and institutional resources to be harnessed. Where communities experience an unaffordable cost of living that forces them to purchase daily necessities in piecemeal and at inflated prices, market actors perceive “predictable and repeated demand” within “embedded trust networks”.

There is, undeniably, an urgent need for solutions to dirty cooking and other developmental challenges in Kenya and across the continent. This need, however, is not going to be met through fixes by private capital simply looking for its next frontier of accumulation, or trying to evade a crisis a legitimacy by portraying itself not as the driver of climate change (or other problems caused by the extractive economy), but the way out of it, while shifting blame onto a depoliticized materiality of CO2, and to individualized citizen-consumers who as evidenced by the case of Koko networks, are remade into subjects to be “helped” but whose deeply political realities are simply instrumentalized for carbon revenue.

Dirty cooking is a product of underdevelopment

Dirty cooking is not an isolated technical problem; it is a product of the structural underdevelopment produced by the current global economic order. Any meaningful attempt to resolve it must begin from that recognition. The place of the global south debt crisis in creating the conditions of poverty that the Brundlandt report was quick to recognize as a cause of environmental degradation and emissions must be recognized. Consequently, debt cancellation must form part of any serious climate solution, freeing public revenues in heavily indebted countries to address developmental and ecological challenges on their own terms. As many have argued, climate justice is inseparable from debt justice. Funding meant to combat climate change must also not be issued in the form of debt (90% of climate financing issued by multilateral development banks such as the World Bank is in the form of loans), which risks worsening the debt crisis and pushing states into even further economic entrapment. Nor should climate funds be used to derisk private accumulation, as in the case of Koko, which will potentially benefit from a $179 million guarantee from MIGA.

Instead, climate finance should be delivered as grants and directed toward strengthening public sector capacity. To encourage clean cooking in Kenya, for instance, this would mean funding and implementing the National Clean Cooking Transition Strategy outside the narrow imperatives of market profitability. Left to the market, solutions will inevitably prioritize returns over public goods. In a 2021 article on the redemptive logic of most socially oriented start-ups in Africa, Joshua Polinksy argues that the “good purpose” of these (commercial) ventures cannot be disentangled from the power structures and ideologies that define what impact is necessary or even possible. One might recall the establishment of the Congo Free State in 1885 by King Leopold II, and his creation of the International African Association (IAA), an organization with ostensibly charitable goals, but which was in fact a cover for ruthless exploitation. The IAA, later renamed to the International Congo Association (ICA), collected donations from the European elite, promising to use them to promote “the civilization and commerce of Africa, and for other human and benevolent purposes.” In practice, King Leopold embarked on a mission to monopolize free trade in Congo, engaging the services of explorers such as Henry Morton Stanley to negotiate with tribal leaders for the sale of land, effectively establishing a brutal private colony and amassing a fortune through ivory and rubber trade.

Koko Networks and other “socially-oriented” start-ups and non-profits in Africa today exist as a rearticulation of this redemptive logic. As part of his philanthropic mission, Leopold set out to establish orphanages in the Congo. However, given the strength of kinship structures in African societies, there were few orphans in the way he had imagined. In response, his forces raided villages to produce them. A similar dynamic is recorded in Charis Enns and Brock Bersaglio’s Settler Ecologies: The Enduring Nature of Settler Colonialism in Kenya, where they unpack how settlers, despite their portrayal today as custodians of wildlife that might otherwise be exterminated by “natives”, were actually responsible for bringing the species they attempt to conserve today to the brink of extermination as they a) promoted wildlife hunting for sport in the earlier days of colonialism and b) eliminated native species that they deemed undesirable and rewilded places with species deemed more desirable. But when the winds of decolonization started blowing, settlers resorted to rescuing species at risk of extinction to shore up moral support for their claim to the land. Today, as the influx of conservation and climate finance in the aftermath of the Kyoto Protocol demands scaling of these settler ecologies, land outside private ownership is increasingly incorporated into carbon and biodiversity credit schemes through the establishment of nominal “community conservancies,” often reproducing older logics of control and extraction under the guise of environmental stewardship.

Most of these redemptive missions are clearly just well-disguised commercial ventures. Not that there is anything inherently wrong with commerce. As Jean Baudrillard noted, human relations have always been structured around a sense of lack; it is this lack that drives systems of exchange, and from which ideas of debt and credit emerge. “To be is to be in debt” is a maxim that Michael Allen Gillespie argues would have gone largely undisputed for most of human history. In modernity, however, this proposition has become less self-evident, with attempts to eliminate indebtedness in its traditional sense emerging as a defining feature of Western modernity. Yet paying off one’s debt does not necessarily abolish indebtedness, as illustrated in Christian theology, where salvation through Jesus renders believers perpetually indebted to him. This “ruse of God” is also the ruse of capital: capital “continually plunges the world into greater debt while simultaneously redeeming it.”

Breaking free from the imperial order

Understanding this ruse in the context of the trajectory of most Global South states requires starting with their incorporation into the global economic order under imperial and unequal terms of exchange. These conditions not only produced debt and underdevelopment but also compelled these states to redeem themselves from this state—either through the accumulation of sovereign debt or through the forms of “salvation” offered by Western capital seeking new frontiers for accumulation such as we witness in the case of Koko. Breaking free from this cycle of unending indebtedness requires confronting unequal exchange itself: the Global North is estimated to drain approximately $2.2 trillion annually from the Global South. This drain occurs primarily through illicit financial flows, including trade mis-invoicing, tax evasion, and corruption. Trade misinvoicing—the deliberate under-or-overstatement of import and export values—accounts for an estimated $30–$52 billion in annual financial flow gaps in Africa alone, representing more than half of such outflows. In recent years, double taxation agreements (DTAs) have also emerged as key mechanisms facilitating tax avoidance. While ostensibly designed to prevent the double taxation of cross-border business activity, corporations frequently exploit these agreements to minimize or evade tax obligations. Under DTAs, countries may waive or reduce taxes on corporate earnings, deferring taxation to the other signatory state. Although intended to attract foreign direct investment, such arrangements often enable corporations to reroute profits to “treaty havens,” where tax liabilities are minimal. In the case of Africa, the UAE and Mauritius have been reported to be the treaty havens undermining tax collection on the continent. Notably, in the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency’s profile of Koko Networks, Mauritius is listed as the “investor” country.

Thus, it would not be far-fetched to believe that Koko Networks benefited from Mauritius’ positioning as a tax haven to access lower tax rates. In fact, it has been reported that an issue of contention in the talks between Koko Networks and the Kenyan government was that the latter was intent on capturing some of the revenue it was losing from companies registered abroad such as Koko. Again, we see the ruse of capital at play; “green” solutions meant to save the continent from “dirty” cooking—a developmental challenge caused by the continent’s inability to mobilize its resources for its own development—evade paying the taxes that would deem their existence/redemptive mission unnecessary.

The provision of decent work and the sustained & inclusive economic growth that would reduce the need for “dirty” cooking methods is not a technical problem to be solved by better-designed programmes; it is a political project that requires challenging the structures of rentierism, unequal exchange, and what the Egyptian economist Samir Amin called the core’s systematic monopolisation of the most profitable forms of production. Southern states have been configured—through colonial extraction and its neoliberal afterlives—as exporters of cheap commodities and labour, dependent on core technologies and currencies, and governed by elites whose interests align with transnational capital rather than national development. Decarbonisation, as currently practised, is not an exception to this dynamic; it is a new chapter of it.