KOKO & Spiro Partnership Exemplifies Kenya’s Growing Clean Tech Ecosystem & Inherent Synergistic Effects

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Industry experts note that the collaboration reinforces Kenya’s position as a hub for sustainable innovation, demonstrating how cross-sector partnerships can accelerate climate resilience and create new economic opportunities.

The lack of access to clean cooking and sustainable transport is a big issue on the African continent. In an exciting development, two companies working to solve both these problems have just signed a partnership agreement. This development highlights the growing clean tech ecosystem on the African continent that is now ramping up, and in the process unlocking valuable inherent synergies. 

Kenya’s clean energy sector has received a major boost following a new partnership between electric mobility leader Spiro and clean fuel distributor KOKO Networks. The partnership will see more than 3,000 KOKO delivery agents adopt Spiro’s electric motorbikes, marking a major milestone in the clean energy and transport sectors. By tapping into Spiro’s e-mobility platform, KOKO will extend its sustainability strategy beyond kitchens into transport, reducing distribution costs while contributing to Kenya’s decarbonization agenda. KOKO Networks distributes bio-ethanol cooking fuel to households in Kenya and Rwanda. Spiro operates more than 35,000 electric motorbikes across Africa and runs the continent’s largest battery-swapping network, with over 20 million battery swaps completed. Spiro says the company’s expanding network of more than 800 swap stations ensures riders and enterprises can access reliable, zero-emission transport at scale.

It’s 2025, and sadly, over 900 million people still do not have access to clean cooking. Yes, almost 1 billion people on the African continent lack access to clean cooking. Wood fuel, waste, and charcoal burned in three‐stone fires are still the dominant energy sources for cooking on the continent. The fuel is “free,” relatively easy to find, and the three‐stone fire offers not only a cooking platform but also provides heat in the colder months of the year. However, the smoke associated with cooking from open fires is dangerous. 4 million people die every year from illnesses associated with smoke from cooking. The Clean Cooking Alliance notes that women and children in developing countries are severely affected as they spend up to 20 hours a week gathering these wood fuels or similar for cooking. Accelerating the transmission to cleaner cooking has become critical and will allow women and children to free up time to take up more productive activities in the community. A lot of these people are in Africa and KOKO Networks is working to help address this major problem.

KOKO says it is mainstreaming liquid bioethanol cooking fuel as a fast, safe, and affordable alternative to dirty cooking fuels such as charcoal. Their website says, “We partner with the downstream fuels industry to “drop in” this new fuel, and offer a suite of distribution, dispensing and end-use technologies that ensure customers can safely access clean fuel at prices that undercut dirty fuels.  The solution to African deforestation starts in its cities, by switching households away from charcoal cooking fuel.”

KOKO says it harnesses bioethanol, a renewable liquid fuel that is already produced at scale as a byproduct of sugar production in most tropical nations. KOKO adds that its ecosystem enables large fuel companies to easily source and handle bioethanol using facilities they already have for petrol, diesel, and kerosene, and then distribute the clean fuel to a network of KOKO bioethanol fuel dispensers (fuel ATMs). These smart fuel ATMs are placed inside thousands of small neighborhood shops by KOKO, enabling widespread fuel availability. KOKO’s distribution channel will now take advantage of the growing electric motorcycle taxi and delivery sector to unlock efficiencies in this network.

Motorcycle taxis are a phenomenon on the African continent, which explains why the motorcycle taxi industry is attracting huge attention and investments. These motorcycle taxis are the heartbeat of the passenger and small goods transport system in a lot of countries in Africa. Close to 30 million motorcycles on the continent are used in this motorcycle taxi industry. With almost 99% of them still being internal combustion engine motorcycles, there is a huge opportunity and a large addressable market for electrification.

The move towards electric vehicles in Africa, especially in this electric motorcycle sector, has mainly been driven by the private sector by small startup companies. A number of these motorcycle startups are now scaling at an incredible pace. Spiro is leading this charge with the highest number of motorcycles on the road, as well as battery swap and charging stations. Spiro and KOKO’s growth in their respective sectors have resulted in the development of inherent synergies leading to their paths to meet sooner rather than later. 

Another positive to add in there is that Kenya’s electricity generation mix is quite clean, with over 90% of electricity generated coming from renewables. That means as KOKO works to lower smoke due to cooking with open fires, and Spiro is working to lower tailpipe emissions in the motorcycle sector, the synergies between the two will have a compounding effect on emissions savings as the two firms continue to scale and unlock further synergies.

By gradually increasing the penetration of electric motorcycles in Kenya, significant savings in CO2 emissions can be achieved through displacing petrol imports with locally generated renewables. This can be achieved by incentivizing purchases of new electric motorbikes. 2023 was the first time the Kenyan motorcycle sales market saw a noticeable increase in the share of electric motorcycles in the overall new registrations market. In 2023, there were 70,691 motorcycles sold in Kenya. 2,557 of these were electric. That means 3.6% of motorcycles sold in 2023 in Kenya were electric. That is almost 4%. So, we did not expect it to be long before the market share reached the critical 5%, which is generally viewed as the tipping point indicating the start of mass adoption.

The share of electric motorcycles rose to 3.6% in 2023 from 2.8% in 2022 and 0.5% in 2021. 2024 was even better as the market share surged to 7.1%. The KNBS Economic Survey Report (2025) shows that 68,804 new motorcycles were registered in Kenya in 2024. Of these, 4,862 motorcycles were electric, according to data presented by the Electric Mobility Association of Kenya (EMAK). That is where the 7.1% market share comes from. B2B fleet sales and partnerships such as this one between Spiro and KOKO will help accelerate the transition to electric. 

Images courtesy of Spiro