Antitrust Battle and Carbon Credit Failure Compound to Kill Koko Networks
A previously undisclosed antitrust dispute has emerged as a second regulatory failure — alongside the inability to find buyers for its carbon credits — that contributed to the collapse of Koko Networks, Kenya's largest clean-cooking company. The combination of antitrust exposure and a failed carbon-credit market exit is being read as a compounding regulatory risk story that goes beyond the cookstove sector's financing model.
Koko Networks: the antitrust clock was ticking before the carbon credits failed
The story everyone told about Koko's collapse was simple: the Kenyan government blocked the carbon credit letters, the subsidy model broke, 700 people lost their jobs.
That story was incomplete. The Competition Authority of Kenya was simultaneously investigating whether Koko's decade-long fuel supply deal with Vivo Energy — which may have locked Koko into a single supplier and locked shops into fixed prices — had been operating outside its legal exemption since March 2024. The exemption lapsed; no amendment was lodged in time; the Authority called it a preliminary breach.
Two regulatory walls closing at once is a different failure mode than one bad policy call. It suggests that Koko's model — built on exclusive infrastructure partnerships and a carbon-credit subsidy that required government sign-off — was load-bearing on regulatory goodwill from multiple directions simultaneously.
For anyone financing the next clean-cooking company, that's the real lesson: not that carbon markets are unreliable, but that a business depending on parallel regulatory permissions, any one of which can lapse or be withheld, is far more fragile than its funding rounds suggest.
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- The Secret Antitrust Battle That Helped Sink Koko Networks · launchbaseafrica.com · T1