We are building what Africa's carbon market should have been from the start.
Savanna Carbon is a Kenya-owned, Kenya-operated carbon credit platform connecting smallholder farmers directly with corporate buyers — and putting the majority of every dollar where the carbon is actually captured: in the farmer's hands.
To root Africa's farmers in the global carbon economy — and make sure the climate wealth of this continent stays on it.
Africa contributes the least to climate change and is hit hardest by it. At the same time, Africa's farmers are already among the best stewards of agricultural carbon in the world — through agroforestry, regenerative practices, and indigenous land management that predates modern sustainability science by centuries.
For three decades, the global carbon market has failed to recognise this. African carbon projects have been dominated by foreign developers, with 70–85% of every dollar captured in the value chain before it reaches the people doing the work. Farmers have been recruited for projects they didn't design, paid fractions of fair value, and left without transparent records of what their carbon was worth.
We think that is a failure of design, not of physics. Our mission is to correct it — starting in Kenya, with a model that pays fairly, measures honestly, and centres the farmer at every stage.
Why we started.
The idea for Savanna Carbon began in Kericho in 2023, watching a tea farmer's grandson explain what ten years of intercropping Grevillea and Markhamia had done to the soil on his grandfather's land — and then explain, with a patience that felt more like a reproach than a report, that no one had ever paid his grandfather a shilling for it.
The carbon markets had been there, technically. Someone had surveyed the farm years ago. Someone had photographed the trees. A project had been registered. Credits had been issued and sold in a European auction. Nothing had reached the farm.
We started looking into why. The answer was simple and depressing: there was no one on the African side whose business model required any of that money to reach the farm. Developers earned from project fees. Brokers earned from spreads. Registries earned from issuances. Auditors earned from audits. The farmer was the one link in the chain without a commercial agent representing him.
The conventional fix is to lobby for standards that require higher benefit sharing. We have done some of that. But the faster fix is to just build the platform that does it — one whose entire business model depends on the farmer being paid well, one whose transparency is not a PR line but a structural requirement, and one whose owners are accountable to the same communities whose land produces the carbon.
That is Savanna Carbon. We are building it in Nairobi, for Kenyan farmers first, and then for East Africa, and then for wherever on the continent the model makes sense. We are not a project developer. We are a marketplace infrastructure — the rail, not the cargo.
Our commitment is simple. Every credit we sell will be traceable to a named farm. Every farmer will be paid 80% of the sale. Every claim we make on this website will be backed by data any buyer can audit. And every time we fall short of any of these, we will say so.
We work with the people closest to the farm.
We don't do this alone. Every farm in our network is reached through a local partner — an NGO, cooperative, or community organisation with existing trust on the ground. Here's who we work with, and how.
Regional NGOs & cooperatives
Locally-led organisations who already work with farmers on agroforestry, tea, and coffee. They identify eligible farms, host the field agent, and remain the farmer's first point of contact through the life of the project.
- Nature Kenya
- Kenya Organic Agriculture Network (KOAN)
- Regional tea & coffee cooperatives
- Women's farming cooperatives
Plan Vivo Foundation
The 30-year-old smallholder-first carbon standard, headquartered in Edinburgh. Their registry holds our credits, their methodology defines our calculations, their annual review validates our technical reports.
- Plan Vivo Foundation (methodology)
- Independent validation auditor
- Independent verification auditor
Industry & climate coalitions
We're members and partners of several Kenyan and pan-African coalitions that connect us with buyers and align us with regional climate policy. Fair buyer pricing is set through these channels.
- Kenya Private Sector Alliance (KEPSA)
- African Carbon Markets Initiative (ACMI)
- Africa Climate Business Forum
- Climate-KIC Kenya
M-Pesa & banking
Safaricom M-Pesa is our default farmer payout channel — reaching farms without formal banking in minutes, at negligible fee. Corporate buyers can pay via corporate M-Pesa or direct bank transfer.
- Safaricom M-Pesa (farmer payouts)
- Kenyan banks (buyer payments)
- SWIFT (international buyer payments)
Kenyan universities
Ongoing soil carbon research, species selection validation, and methodology refinement happens in partnership with Kenyan agricultural and environmental research institutions.
- Egerton University (soil carbon)
- University of Nairobi (ecology)
- KALRO (agricultural research)
- ICIPE (agro-ecosystems)
EU buyer-side partners
For European SME buyers — particularly in coffee, tea, and textile supply chains sourcing from Kenya — we work with a small set of trusted intermediary consultancies who facilitate buyer introductions without inserting extra margin into the chain.
- Netherlands-based coffee buyers
- German tea import partners
- EU ESG consultancies (non-exclusive)
We are raising our seed round.
Savanna Carbon is open to early-stage investment and impact-aligned grants from partners who understand that African-owned climate infrastructure is both the right thing and the commercial opportunity. We are raising $100–150K to bring our first 500 farmers online and sell our first 2,000 tonnes in Year 1.
We are particularly interested in partners who bring more than capital: Plan Vivo experience, European buyer networks, Kenyan regulatory insight, or deep credibility in smallholder community work.
The questions we're asked most often.
Listed prices are $12–16 per tonne CO₂e, depending on the practice type and scale of the farm. Coffee agroforestry and reforestation projects price slightly higher because they typically sequester more carbon per acre with stronger co-benefits. Regenerative farming and conservation agriculture sit at the lower end.
This pricing sits above the voluntary market's African smallholder average, and we are clear about why: fair farmer payment (our 80% share) requires a price floor that reflects what quality certification and on-ground verification actually cost. We will not sell below cost, and we will not sell above what the science supports.
Yes. We actively encourage multi-year forward-purchase agreements (typically 2–5 years) because they give farmers revenue certainty, which is the single biggest thing holding back long-term practice adoption in smallholder settings.
Forward purchases lock in price and volume, come with annual delivery against the audit cycle, and typically receive 5–10% preferential pricing versus spot. Minimum forward purchase is 500 tonnes per year; contact us for terms.
Every credit carries a unique serial number from the Plan Vivo registry. Once you purchase, we retire the credit to your organisation's name on the public Plan Vivo registry, and issue you a retirement certificate linking to that registry entry.
You can independently verify on the Plan Vivo website that your specific serial number is retired to your company. For buyers above 500 tonnes, we also provide the full audit trail — GPS coordinates of each farm, Plan Vivo annual report reference, auditor findings, and farmer payment confirmation receipts (anonymised as needed for privacy).
Our credits are voluntary carbon credits, suitable for use in corporate offsetting claims under standards like CDP, GRI, and ISO 14064. They are most commonly applied against residual Scope 1 and 2 emissions, or against specific Scope 3 emissions where insetting is relevant (e.g., a German coffee roaster purchasing credits from the same Kenyan regions it sources from).
SBTi currently restricts the use of offsets against interim targets but permits them against residual emissions at the net-zero year under the Corporate Net-Zero Standard. Our credits meet the quality standards SBTi references (permanence, additionality, verification), but whether they fit your specific target architecture depends on your commitment. We recommend discussing with your SBTi validator.
For Kenyan corporate buyers: corporate M-Pesa, direct bank transfer, or business cheque. For international buyers: SWIFT wire transfer (USD or EUR) to our Kenyan banking partner. Stablecoin (USDC) settlement is available by prior arrangement for larger purchases where FX cost is a concern.
We do not accept credit card payments for credits — settlement certainty matters more to us than convenience, and card fees would eat into the farmer's 80% share.
Two layers of protection. First, every farm's issuance already has a 15% buffer withheld and pooled — this buffer is the first line of defence against non-permanence. If trees die on your farm, the buffer pool covers the shortfall on your already-purchased credits; they remain valid.
Second, ongoing satellite monitoring flags tree cover loss within 90 days. If a farm exits the program, future credits simply stop being issued — but credits already issued and sold represent carbon that was already sequestered and is covered by the buffer pool. Your purchase is not retroactively invalidated.
Hapana. La. No. Savanna Carbon is free to join for farmers, at every stage. There is no registration fee, no survey fee, no audit fee, no withdrawal fee. If anyone — a field agent, a middleman, a neighbour — asks you to pay anything to join Savanna Carbon or receive your carbon payments, please contact us directly to report it. We will investigate.
The 20% platform share comes off the buyer's payment, not the farmer's. Your 80% is calculated on the gross sale value — before any deductions.
You are paid when credits from your farm are sold to a buyer. This happens in annual cycles tied to the audit. After each year's audit confirms your farm's carbon performance, new credits are issued for your farm onto the Plan Vivo registry. When those credits sell, you receive 80% of the sale value within 24 hours, straight to your M-Pesa (or cooperative account, if you prefer).
In Year 1, you may see multiple smaller payments through the year as credits sell in batches. Our forward-purchase agreements with larger buyers help smooth this out over time.
You do. Full stop. Savanna Carbon never takes ownership of your land, your trees, or your harvest. What we hold is a contractual right to issue carbon credits based on your practice, with your consent, and to share the income from those credits with you on the 80/20 terms.
You can leave the program at any time. Your land, trees, crops, and any co-benefits (fruit, timber, shade, erosion control, ecological improvement) remain yours forever.
Trees are living things. A small number die every year from disease or weather, and some are planned for harvest (timber, fruit). Our carbon model accounts for this already — we deduct a conservative mortality allowance every year before issuing credits.
If you need to remove a tree for a legitimate reason — planned harvest, disease management, replacing with a better species — please inform your field agent. It will not affect credits already issued for that year. If systematic tree loss occurs (the farm is cleared), future credit issuance stops, but there is no penalty — credits that have already been paid out stay paid out.
Yes. Many of our current farms are cooperatives or women's groups, and we pay the cooperative account directly. The cooperative then distributes among members according to its own rules. We encourage transparent distribution, but we don't dictate it — your governance is your governance.
The one thing we will do is provide the cooperative with a public breakdown of what was received from Savanna Carbon, so members can see the total. What the cooperative does from there is its own decision.
Absolutely. Carbon credits are sold alongside your normal farm products, not instead of them. Your coffee buyer, tea factory, timber market — those relationships continue exactly as before. In fact, many of our farmers find that their agroforestry practice actually improves the main crop (tea and coffee yields stable or higher under shade, soil quality rising for food crops).
Carbon is a second income stream on top of what you already earn, not a replacement for it.
Rift Valley (Kericho, Nakuru, Uasin Gishu, Nandi, Bomet, Elgeyo-Marakwet), Central Kenya (Nyeri, Murang'a, Kirinyaga, Kiambu, Nyandarua), and Western Kenya (Kakamega, Bungoma, Kisumu, Vihiga, Busia, Siaya). We focus on these three regions because they have strong existing NGO and cooperative infrastructure and ecological conditions well-suited to agroforestry and regenerative practices.
Expansion to the rest of Kenya and East Africa (Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania) is planned for 2027–2028, dependent on successful delivery of Year 1–2 outcomes.
Three main differences. First, ownership: we are Kenya-incorporated, Kenya-operated, and partner-governed with Kenyan NGOs and cooperatives. Most comparable projects are structured through offshore developers. Second, benefit sharing: our 80% farmer share is the highest in the African smallholder market by a meaningful margin; typical competitor projects sit between 15–30%. Third, transparency: every farm is named, every calculation is explained, every claim on our website is linked to its source. We publish our methodology, not just our results.
We are a for-profit Kenyan limited company. We believe that building sustainable climate infrastructure requires commercial discipline — staff paid properly, systems built to scale, reinvestment in platform improvement. A charity model, in our view, has historically led to under-built infrastructure and dependency on grant cycles, which is not what this market needs.
Our 10% platform share is sized to sustain the business, not to maximise returns. We are building for durability, not exit.
Savanna Carbon is founded and operated out of Nairobi by a Kenyan team with backgrounds across agricultural economics, carbon methodology, and financial technology. Our founding commitment is that the board, the executive team, and the shareholder base remain majority-African — not as a marketing line, but as a governance reality.
We publish our leadership and governance structure at the point of our first external funding close. For investor due diligence we can share this earlier on request.
Email is the fastest way — [email protected] reaches our team and we respond within 2 working days. For buyers wanting a formal quote, the Request a quote form is the structured path. For farmers wanting to register, the farmers registration form is the right start.
For press, partnership, or investor enquiries, please email with the subject line indicating your context.
Work with us.
Whether you're a farmer in the Rift Valley, a sustainability lead in Europe, an impact investor in Nairobi, or a journalist wanting to check our numbers — we want to hear from you.
[email protected]