KOKO sells a low-cost two-burner cooker stove
that is fueled using ethanol. So it is a clean cooking solution.
KOKO applied for the tender from the Netherlands Enterprise Agency
because we wanted to accelerate the uptake of our KOKO cooker amongst the low income consumers.
By nature they do not trust.
For them to buy something, they really have to trust.
They do not have money to waste, so to speak.
So for us it is more expensive to demonstrate value
because it is about reaching these people one-on-one.
Our first main products are the solar home systems
and that means a simple kit with two lights and a phone charger
and a radio or 6, 8 or 10 lights with a phone charger.
We are based in Thies, 70 km from Dakar.
Last year we wrote a proposal to the Netherlands Enterprise Agency
to extend our work in the far east part of Senegal.
It would be very hard for me to go there. All the way from Thies to there, it is about 800 km.
And it would be very expensive just to start from scratch.
So we can, with the help from the Netherlands Enterprise Agency
to also give those people access to energy.
Building trust is a process.
So how did we do that?
Who was the trusting agent that we identified?
The local shopkeeper who they buy from everyday.
So we went to the shopkeepers within the low-income areas
and we have identified them as agents of KOKO cookers and KOKO fuel.
There is someone. There is a face, there is a person they can actually talk to.
With this chance of the tender from the Netherlands Enterprise Agency,
we could speed up our development in the rural east side of Senegal.
For us, any mechanism that enables us
to get charcoal and dirty fuels out of consumers' hands is a win for us.
The tender for us was important because it enabled us
to accelerate reaching the low-income consumers.
So this tender enabled us to get all this done
within a shorter time than we would have.
We would have eventually reached a lot of these consumers
that we've reached with the tender
but this has enabled us to get to them a lot sooner.
To be able to sell in remote villages,
we are really in need of local agents that are embedded in the community.
because the people need to have trust.
They have to make sure that you are not just passing by the village
but also be back and back to also secure the warranty that we offer.