African farmers as climate entrepreneurs

2022-23 Scale-up project

Overview 

This project aims to prove viable business models for African smallholder farmers to adopt a range of climate-smart interventions, whose carbon impact is tracked, validated and translated into revenue that can either go to the farmers or towards subsidizing the costs of new technologies or of driving adoption of new practices. If successful, the effort will demonstrate that such farmers can realize significant amounts of carbon revenue from either voluntary or compliance markets, while proving that smallholders as a class can deliver high quality carbon credits at competitive price points.

The Climate Action Platform for Africa (CAP-A) works to help unlock Africa’s potential as a global hub for climate action that underpins a new climate smart model of economic growth and inclusive livelihoods. They do so through insight generation, advocacy and thought partnership and initiative development.

Project's trajectory over the past year

CAP-A’s proof of concept builds on price-discovery pilots to build a demand curve for climate-smart interventions. Over the past year, the program has uncovered two important insights. Firstly, the demand for smallholder farmer (SHF) carbon credits remains uncertain, as these credits are typically involved in small-scale and research-driven transactions. Secondly, there is a necessity to explore alternative approaches to monetize the regenerative practices of SHFs and the co-benefits they provide.

Impact

The program revealed that when carbon credit prices, mimicked at a higher rate, were reduced by approximately $25, it led to a significant 117% increase in the monthly tech adoption rate among farmers.