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PwC Takes Over Koko Networks After Clean-Cooking Startup Enters Administration
The collapse caps nearly two years of worsening financial and operational pressure, including in 2024 when Koko was forced to pivot to more expensive and often insufficient local supply, a shift insiders say squeezed margins and destabilised its fuel logistics.
- Categories
- Energy, Environment
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Viewpoint: After 2030: Defending the Global Goals in an Age of Retreat
If the SDGs are to be replaced or reimagined after 2030, the most urgent task is to identify what must not be lost.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Education, Energy, Environment, Finance, Health Care, Investing, Technology, WASH
- Region
- Global
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‘I Can’t Afford Cooking Gas,’ Shutdown of Kenya’s Koko Biofuel Firm Wipes Out Clean Cooking Options
In Nairobi's informal settlements, the closure of Kenyan supplier Koko Networks has left thousands of households without access to clean bioethanol cooking fuel.
- Categories
- Energy, Environment
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Analysis: When USAID Shut Down, Its Lessons Nearly Vanished. AI Helped Recover Them
A final sweep of 60 years of evidence reveals durable truths about how development succeeds and fails.
- Categories
- Education, Social Enterprise, Technology
- Region
- Global
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Analysis: Big Bets and Broken Unicorns: Tiger Global’s Rise and Reckoning
The fast-money pandemic era helped build billion-dollar startups around the world — then brought many down just as quickly. Will the AI boom be a repeat?
- Categories
- Investing
- Region
- Global
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Viewpoint: Babyl Paradox: When Evidence-Based Digital Success Cannot Beat Corporate Failure
A platform delivering superior healthcare outcomes became another cautionary tale of corporate failure.
- Categories
- Health Care, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Built to Fail: Rules at UN Climate Talks Favor the Status Quo, Not Progress
"Experts say stifling bureaucratic procedures that are disconnected from the climate crisis have consistently stalled COP negotiations."
- Categories
- Energy, Environment
- Region
- Global
- Tags
- climate change, failure, impact investing, NGOs, SDGs
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Turning Failure into Fuel: An Emerging Learning Platform Aims to Bring the Hidden Challenges in Humanitarian Energy to Light
The humanitarian energy sector is eager to learn from success. But according to clean cooking and energy access researchers Nazifa Rafa, Tash Perros, Iwona Bisaga and Ronan Ferguson, its failures are usually buried in reports or quietly brushed aside, and there's often a disconnect between what’s documented in impact reports and what practitioners experience on the ground. They argue that this dynamic is unsustainable in a sector with high risks, urgent needs and shrinking funding. In response, they share an emerging solution: the Humanitarian Energy Learning Platform, a centralized, inter-donor learning system designed to highlight what’s going wrong in humanitarian energy access, and how practitioners can systematically learn from it.
- Categories
- Energy
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