In this episode, Sarah sits down with Nzioki Munyao, founder and CEO of Consuming Carbon and creator of Pamoja DMRV, to explore how climate action, technology, and community prosperity can work together. Nzioki shares how a conversation about bamboo’s carbon-sequestering potential inspired him to return to his roots in Kenya and launch Consuming Carbon, which now works with more than 3,000 farmers across 6,000 acres. Nzioki explains how Pamoja DMRV uses AI, satellite imagery, sensors, and blockchain technology to make carbon projects transparent, traceable, and verifiable, while allowing farmers and project developers to access the platform for free. The conversation also explores bamboo and Biochar, including their potential to restore degraded land, improve soil, and create new income for farmers. Nzioki discusses what it takes to scale these projects across Africa, from community buy-in and government regulations to ensuring that the communities doing the climate work actually benefit from it. He shares Consuming Carbon’s vision for using carbon revenues to support community needs and explains how a trusted, community-centered model could help Africa capture more of the value of its enormous climate potential.
About Our Guest
Nzioki Munyao is the founder and CEO of Consuming Carbon and creator of Pamoja DMRV. Nzioki was born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, and spent most of his school holidays in rural Kenya, where he developed a deep connection to the land and communities of Machakos County. After serving in the military and building a career spanning several decades in the tech sector, he returned to his roots with a singular focus, proving that climate action and community prosperity are not competing priorities, but the same goal pursued together.
Transcript
Nzioki Munyao (00:00)
Trust is the main thing. It’s the currency in the carbon markets that’s going to allow for people in the climate action space to do work in a credible way.
Sarah Johnson (00:03)
Welcome to the Pathway Podcast. I’m your host, Sarah Johnson, and thank you for joining us for this episode.
Pathway to Tomorrow is a nonprofit with initiatives in housing, environmental conservation, and water security. In this podcast series, we engage with leaders working on solving some of the world’s most challenging problems by exploring innovative solutions being implemented by leading NGOs, nonprofits, think tanks, companies, and institutions focused on issues like environmental conservation, homelessness, climate change, and water security.
Sarah Johnson (00:36)
Our guest today is Nzioki Munyao, founder and CEO of Consuming Carbon and creator of Pamoja DMRV. Nzioki was born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, and spent most of his school holidays in rural Kenya, where he developed a deep connection to the land and communities of Machakos County. After serving in the military and building a career spanning several decades in the tech sector, he returned to his roots with a singular focus, proving that climate action and community prosperity are not competing priorities, but the same goal pursued together.
Consuming Carbon is a Delaware-based climate company with primary operations in Kenya. It develops carbon projects across Sub-Saharan Africa, including bamboo reforestation, Biochar production, regenerative agriculture, and clean cookstoves.
Nzioki has also built the software infrastructure that verifies those projects are real. That software platform, Pamoja DMRV, is a digital measurement reporting and verification platform that brings together farmers, project developers, government regulators, auditors, and carbon credit buyers into a single transparent system, anchored to a public blockchain, so that every step from field measurement to credit issuance is tamper evident and traceable.
The work is personal. Some of the land hosting these projects is Nzioki’s own, and the farmers participating are members of cooperatives he helped organize. Today, Consuming Carbon works with more than 3,000 farmers across 6,000 acres of farmland.
With projects registered under Verra, Gold Standard, and Puro Earth. Additionally, through its Pamoja DMRV platform, the company oversees a portfolio of approximately 300,000 tons spanning Kenya and Uganda. Nzioki holds his roots in Wamunyu in Kenya’s Machakos County, where his father began planting bamboo in 1997, the same fields that now anchor one of the company’s flagship carbon projects. His work sits at the intersection of climate science, agricultural community development and technology infrastructure with a clear through line, ensuring that the people doing the climate work are the ones who benefit from it.
Sarah Johnson (02:46)
Nzioki, it’s such a pleasure to have you on today. Thank you so much for joining us.
Nzioki Munyao (02:50)
Thank you for having me, Sarah.
Sarah Johnson (02:53)
So Nzioki, to start us off, I’d like to ask about your background. You were born in Kenya, you served in the military, you spent decades in tech, and now you’ve come back to your ancestral homeland to build a carbon company. This is not an obvious through line. What was the moment or the realization that made this feel like the thing you had to do?
Nzioki Munyao (03:14)
Thank you, Sarah. That’s a great question. And it all started December 4th, 2024. We’re now sitting by our home on the farm in Wamunyu and staring at the bamboo with somebody who knew a lot about carbon sequestration, and he was telling me the benefits of bamboo, the byproducts from bamboo, and then he closed out the conversation with “it sequesters multiple times the carbon dioxide of a regular tree.” And I got very curious about that because I’d learned about climate action and I’d wanted to do something about it. And that sparked a very keen interest on how bamboo can be a catalyst for that.
And from that point on I went into researching and he and I continued talking and from that conversation we very quickly within four weeks found that bamboo does indeed have multiple byproducts, which would be a great revenue generator for people around Wamunyu and around Sub-Saharan Africa. But then it was create a canopy for them, it would create revenue for them and it would also help with climate action, which made it just this magical plant that fit very well with everything that I’ve been doing in farming, in technology, and I felt that it gave me a deep, deep purpose to get into climate action, and that’s where the idea came up. And four weeks later, consuming carbon was started.
Sarah Johnson (04:56)
That’s such a great story, just that moment, that spark, and here you are today with such a huge impact. So I know you’d mentioned that your father started planting bamboo in 2004 and you watched it grow and mature, and as you mentioned for years, this was just farming. At what point did you look at those fields and see a carbon sequestration project? And what did you have to learn to make that leap?
Nzioki Munyao (05:21)
Well it was pretty straightforward. My dad loves planting trees and it’s actually very beautiful when you see what the land looked like before and what it looks like after and the benefits and the feeling you get from seeing greenery. It’s almost like the same as when you walk out of the house and go for a walk in a forest, you feel a sense of peace and just a stronger connection to nature. So I knew that as you drive across Kenya, you know, if you take a drive from the coast and you go into the highlands, you know, 10-hour drive, you will see from corner to corner because there’s no forests. And Kenya used to be much more forested than it is today. And I was thinking about the bamboo, and I was like, you know, this bamboo grows pretty fast. And it’s a grass, which means that if you cut it, it grows again.
And Kenya, what Kenya is lacking is that canopy, the forest, the shade, and it’s you know, a lot of our soil is getting degraded. So I was looking for a solution, and this solution had been there the entire time. You know, my dad planted the trees, the grass, and the grass grew well. And he had planted multiple variations of bamboo. You know, we have the Dendrocalamus asper, we have the Bambusa and we looked around and said, hey, this is actually a really good solution, and have seen now that turn into Farmland that was completely barren, degraded land, turned around into bamboo, where even the feeling of walking through that particular small farmland now feels so much better. There’s an ecosystem formed from it. You’ll see animals starting to come back. You know, you’ll see water starting to get better as it kind of stores within the land, and the soil gets helped.
So bamboo just provides so much more than most regular trees for areas that are degraded land like those in Kenya. And it just became just the way to go for how we wanted to start the work in climate action because it also does sequester quite a bit of carbon dioxide.
Sarah Johnson (07:43)
Thank you for sharing that, Nzioki. So I’d like to pivot into talking about the carbon markets today. So as we both know, the carbon markets have a trust problem. There have been high profile scandals where credits were issued for forests that didn’t exist or weren’t actually protected. And you’re operating in that environment, right? So trying to convince buyers that your projects are real. I’d love to just hear a bit more about your perspective there. How serious is that credibility gap? And how does Pamoja, your proprietary software platform, actually solve it rather than just adding another layer of complexity and claims.
Nzioki Munyao (08:19)
That’s a very good question, especially in the carbon markets. So let’s look at the problem today. The problem today is a buyer would go and purchase a certificate, which is tied to a project that says that there’s these number of carbon credits that are tied to this certificate. Let’s call it a reforestation project.
And they would trust that all the players that made this certificate possible, all through the multiple stakeholders, from the farmer or the landowner to the national registry, if there’s one for that country, to the verification bodies that do the registering and those who do the third-party auditing of it to the sale of the certificate or the issuance of the carbon credits have done their due diligence and have made sure that everything meets the requirements.
And once this buyer completes the sale, in some cases, they know where the project is, they have all the proof points, they have the documentation to back it up, and they can be as responsible as they are, you know, buying these credits to offset a lot of the greenhouse gases that they are releasing into the environment. So we love these companies, but then some of the players in these markets, as much as they’re doing their best to provide the climate action, are finding it difficult to prove this on an ongoing basis.
So the monitoring and the compliance are very hard to prove. And for a forest, you know, how do you prove that you planted a tree? How do you prove that the tree still exists today? How do you prove that it’s still sequestering the carbon dioxide that was mentioned in the documentation that ended up in the certificate? And why companies are worried about that today is because most of them buy these certificates without real proof to show that this tree still exists and it’s still sequestering the carbon several years after the fact and it sometimes comes back to bite them. And there’s a lot of those cases, very easy to find online.
However, we found that if we build a platform to address this gap, then that is going to be the one thing that definitely gives us the edge because one, we’re the carbon project developer on the ground working directly with the farmers or the landowners. Two, we are working with all the stakeholders who are going to get this project from a concept all the way to the issuance of credits, the compliance and the monitoring.
So we are responsible for the entire chain, and we have third-party auditors, we have the registries, we are part of the accounts, so we understand everything from the beginning to the point of the project. And because we are tied to the entire process, we then used our strength in technology building alongside AI to build out Pamoja DMRV.earth.
Pamoja DMRV.earth and Pamoja, by the way, means together in Swahili. Pamoja DMRV.earth is a platform that is agentic AI, basically, which means that there are agents, AI (Artificial Intelligence) agents within the platform who are continually improving on the platform’s performance. And the platform’s goal is to address, by proving everything that we have implemented is correct. And we back this up by using the Hedera blockchain.
So for a lot of the transactions and a lot of the activities that are happening on the platform, we are monitoring using tools like satellites. We are using tools like Internet of Things, where these actual sensors in the soil, and in some cases, some of the trees. We have field agents who are able to use the platform to go in and validate that trees and other things that have been stated on the platform still exist and are still backing up from what we’re seeing on the satellite imagery.
And then we can show in near real time, you know, images of the actual forest, which means that if a buyer has purchased an issued certificate from a registry such as Verra, and in this case for reforestry using Verra’s methodology 0047, which is a forestry and reforestry, then for the bamboo projects that we have, you will be very quickly able to verify and validate using the Pamoja platform as a buyer, as a government stakeholder, as the landowner themselves, as a third-party verification body, as the registry itself, we can connect directly to through APIs to their registry and be able to address the gap of is this true? And can we monitor this for seven, 20 plus years, you know, you can just determine however long you want to monitor it and Pamoja DMRV will do that for you directly from the field to the issuance of the certificate with all stakeholders aligned.
So we believe that this is truly unique, especially for the African markets where it’s very hard to trust that the project is coming through, especially looking at the Western buyers, they’re looking for that credibility and immutability of these records. And that’s where we have it all linked up to the blockchain.
Sarah Johnson (14:03)
Thanks for sharing that, Nzioki. That’s very exciting. I have spoken with quite a few different creators of similar software platforms, and I haven’t to date heard of a platform that enables pictures. And so, you know, that visual capability I think is very unique. That really stood out for me. So you built a platform with blockchain verification, AI infrastructure, satellite monitoring, and also 10 role-based portals, right, for the different stakeholders in a project. And you’re giving it away free to project developers. Most tech founders would call that a product, charge for it, and skip the farming entirely. Why did you insist on doing both and what would be lost if you separated them?
Nzioki Munyao (14:50)
That’s a great question. And coming from Africa, the one thing you know most people would understand is a lot of these project developers, a lot of the farmers and landowners, they may be land rich but they’re cash poor. So charging for a platform that is looking to do climate action at scale for these markets is very, very difficult if you are to pull it off at the scale that we’re looking to do.
So the model and strategy that we’re using is proving that what we are doing is accurate by first allowing for the people doing the project development to have a tool where they can track everything that they are doing to develop the project. So think of the farmer who has degraded land that is very interested in planting this bamboo with our assistance, of course, and guidance. And we have, you know, an agreement with a cooperative there. And the cooperative says, “Hey, we have this Pamoja DMRV platform. Let’s plant the bamboo together here. For your land, we’ve assessed and found that this bamboo is going to work well given the rainfall or the amount of water that you have and the land.” And they plant and they track each bamboo comb that they put on the ground from the time it’s planted, and they track this using the actual platform to take the photos of the different stages of the bamboo growing on Pamoja DMRV. We anchor that to the blockchain, and then that is a very viable, immutable record of this particular planting happening with this farmer.
Fast forward that one year and the farmer now has a little canopy of a forest that is growing on their land, and you can see the progress of it all within the Pamoja DMRV platform. So why am I saying that process and why is it important in how we have strategized on how Pamoja becomes a tool that is also profitable? So, the farmer initially does not have the ability to use a platform to track all this, but what we’re trying to solve is trust.
Trust is the main thing. It’s the currency in the carbon markets that’s going to allow for people in the climate action space to do work in a credible way. Credible, trustworthy, traceable, and verifiable way. And Pamoja does that. So we then compile all that information that is captured into the platform and essentially are telling the story using data. And the data that’s been entered by the different users from these 10 portals, so think the farmer or the landowner.
You have the national regulator. And in Kenya, that would be the National Environment Management Authority, NEMA. And then you’d have the registry, so in this case Verra, you’d have the third-party verification and validation body that does third-party auditing, and other key stakeholders in there, they would go in and put in the information and they will get this project all the way through its approvals, in Kenya we do have to get a letter of no objection from the county from the national government, so the National Environment Management Authority has to give us a letter of no objection to say you can go ahead with this project. All that information is stored in the platform.
And essentially, just the same way you have pathology in healthcare, this is a way you can follow the path of how the carbon project came together with data points. So we have data points across the platform. So once you have all that, again, nobody has paid anything up until this point. When the buyer then gets to the platform and is able to validate everything that they have, they would find tremendous value in these carbon credits from this project. They can validate this project, right? Because they have all the data points in the story told within the platform in an immutable way that stores into the blockchain.
They then purchase the credits, obviously through Verra is where they would buy the project because Verra is the issuing registry that has a marketplace that the buyer can go in and purchase. And then once they have purchased this, they will be paying premium because they can prove everything up until just a few days ago within the platform. And the buyer would have a portal in the platform where they can track all this. They would have dashboards and reports. They would be up to date with everything. And in many ways, you know, they can use this towards their ESG and their reporting. When they pay for these carbon credits, these carbon credits from the project is where we deduct a dollar for each credit sold to pay for the platform. And thus the buyer pays for the platform’s use.
And in essence, all the other stakeholders that create the trust in the process and in the entire project are covered through this purchase. So that’s how Pamoja is funded, where it allows for people who are doing the work to do the work correctly and tell the story correctly, verifiably, in a trustworthy manner, and the buyer, you know, gets to pay a much better price for something that they trust and they can verify.
Sarah Johnson (20:45)
Thank you for explaining that, Nzioki. Really exciting again. It sounds like a very sophisticated platform that’s clearly been given a lot of thought and covers, sounds like it covers all of the bases that one would consider in a project like this. And so thank you so much for creating this platform. So I want to now talk about one of the products that you develop, Biochar. We know Biochar is described as locking carbon into soil for centuries. And if you could actually, for our listeners, explain what Biochar is, that would be really helpful. But you know, this claim that Biochar can lock carbon into soil for centuries, hundreds of years, is a bold one in a field full of bold claims. What does the actual science say? And how are you verifying that the carbon stays where you say it does?
Nzioki Munyao (21:40)
That’s great. Biochar is a fantastic organic fertilizer that we produce using organic waste like farm waste. So think of when you harvest something like sugarcane or you harvest maize, peas, pigeon peas and other agricultural waste. We take that and then use a pyrolysis kiln. So pyrolysis is where you burn this organic waste in a deoxygenized way, which is what is referred to as pyrolysis, to then compact carbon into this organic waste, which comes out looking like a charcoal. And then you can combine that with urine or another additive and that goes back into the soil.
And this carbon-heavy Biochar is what then goes into the soil. And similar to charcoal, I know this is just an example here, but the Biochar has the ability to, through its pores, store more water, allow for microorganisms to get in there. And with this combination and the soil, especially for degraded soils, Biochar does a good job of now kind of creating aeration within the soil, improving upon the drainage, and being able to support crops that are growing on this land, you know, similar to what we’re doing with the bamboo. It helps enrich the soil, even for crops that, you know farmers who are interested in just improving upon their soils, Biochar is a very good replacement for, you know, chemical fertilizers.
And historically, you know, I’ve seen articles there and you know the readers or the listeners here can look at Biochar found in the Amazon, you know, that’s over a thousand years old. So Biochar is a material that’s been used, a fertilizer that’s been used historically. So it’s not something new. It’s very well done. You can even buy Biochar in Walmart here in the United States. And in Africa it is a substitute for the chemical fertilizer for the places where some of the farmers can purchase, say, a package of about 50 kilograms they can buy it from Biochar producers and we believe that the carbon credits from Biochar, so we work with pure.earth which is owned by Nasdaq. There’s a lot of credibility in how pure.earth looks at this. So they’ve put in a lot of science, a lot of studies around why this is the way for holding carbon in the soil. And companies like Google and Microsoft prefer to have Biochar credits because of the permanence.
Permanence is how long is the carbon sequestered from the environment and held within the atmosphere? So, like, how can we hold carbon from going up into the atmosphere? And this Biochar holds carbon within the soil, and the soil loves carbon and plants love carbon. So, by putting it back into the soil, it gives it that permanence. And science does say that Biochar holds a hundred plus years of carbon in the soil, and we can see this in some of the applications, and the carbon credits, their value also reflects this.
For example, we’ve been talking about bamboo, which is a reforestation carbon credit, and that reforestation carbon credit, which is using photosynthesis to sequester carbon dioxide from the environment, is valued anywhere between 14 and 20 dollars per metric ton, equivalent of carbon from the environment, right? Now the Biochar one does that at a hundred and fifty dollars plus per metric ton of CO2 equivalent from the environment, which means that it’s a very premium carbon credit. And for degraded lands like those we have in Africa, you’d be putting two plus tons per acre for it to really start working on the soil, but you also want to give it time to get within the soils and really start working. So sometimes you want to apply it and allow for time.
So in the way we implement Biochar, the goal, for example, we are working on implementing that in Western Kenya where there’s a lot of sugarcane plantations and the farmers of these sugarcane plantations, their soil is degraded. So when they take them to the factories, there’s a lot of sugarcane bagass, which is the waste from the sugarcane. So we would take this bagasse and use that as the biomass from it. We’d use it as a feedstock for the kiln, and we would then produce Biochar from this sugarcane bagasse, which then goes back to the farmers who provided the sugarcane in the first place.
And it would rejuvenate their soils and they will be able to improve upon their harvest, which then basically improves upon their returns and also their soil and the longevity of the ability to produce their sugarcane to provide for their families. And now in some cases, they would also benefit from the program because as they come together, the Biochar’s premium price that’s being fetched out there. You know, by law, we do have to split this with the farmers as we get the revenues. So they get an additional benefit from that. So Biochar has multiple benefits in the carbon markets and in climate action. And I’d highly recommend for people to look at it because it is a way that we can help improve upon the soils, which is one of the most critical parts on the planet for us to improve as farmers and just folks who are interested in improving upon the planet and healing it.
Sarah Johnson (28:16)
Thank you for sharing that, Nzioki. Really great explanation. Really great job breaking it down for us. I appreciate that. So now I want to talk about your whole operation, you know, which we’ve touched on a bit, but would love to dive a bit deeper. So you have 3,000 farmers on 6,000 acres, a cooperative of 2,000 members, projects in Kenya and Malawi, and you and you also monitor a cookstove portfolio of roughly 300,000 tons. This is a lot of moving parts. What’s the hardest thing to get right operationally for you? And what breaks first when you try to scale?
Nzioki Munyao (28:57)
Another great question. The first thing that we have to get operationally right is can we provide proof for everything that we are claiming to have carbon credits against? And we’ve spoken here about the verification of the planting of the bamboo, for example, and you know, can we prove that? We’ve also spoken about the Biochar. How do we prove that? And Pamoja is the answer.
Pamoja is a system that is looking at the bamboo from satellite. So at any point we can tell you, yeah, three days ago, here’s a photo of what that forest looked like. And we can verify this for the regulator in Kenya. We can verify this for the regulator in Malawi. We can do the same for Uganda. The farmer or the household out there that is using a cookstove, we have functionality to show that this farmer or this household has used this cookstove based on the IoT, the Internet of Things, the sensor that’s by the cookstove.
That information is natively pulled into the Pamoja DMRV platform. So a cookstove company can now say, hey, we can show you in near real time how the cookstove is being used, which then gives them the compliance and the monitoring credibility and trust in their carbon credits. So even for these cookstove project developers, they’re able now to show and prove that these cookstoves are truly improving upon the communities that they’re serving. And the project is validated that way for the buyer who’s buying these cookstove projects.
So now what makes it difficult to scale something like this? If you do this in a vacuum where you’re just providing the technology and you are coming in to profitably drive the engagement of the folks on the ground in order to drive scale, in Africa that will be very difficult simply because you must have the buy-in of the community itself down to the individual. The individual farmer and household have first to buy in so you have to be at the ground level with the folks there in the community.
So for example, we just got back from Kenya and we spent a week and change out in the western part of Kenya. So we were in a place called Busia. And in Busia the team and I went and we got to meet the farmers. We got to meet the people who’ve planted the bamboo. We got to meet with the governor of Busilla, the County Commissioner, the Deputy County Commission Commissioner, the different departments within the Busilla government, the climate change department. We got to meet with NEMA officials. We got to meet with a lot of the stakeholders that make such a project successful. And we got to spend time with them and listened to them. We got to hear their complaints.
One complaint that somebody was talking about was somebody planted their bamboo on the path where we would usually walk our cows past. And we’re like, okay, so your livestock is very important and the local chief was there to listen to this claim and you know they were able to solve that problem with the community while we were there. So that community engagement piece, if you cannot get that piece right, then you might as well just understand that your project will not go long term. You have to have community buy-in in Africa for any project to be feasible.
And then the second part is the regulations around the carbon market. So, for example, in Kenya right now, if you’re working under NEMA, which again is the National Environment Management Authority of Kenya, they have a carbon markets framework and a law that states that, you know, once you do this project, there’s certain divisions of revenue that need to go, or percentages, that need to go out to the community or the farmer, the ones that need to go to the government, and then the ones that the project developer is, you know, basically recouping for the cost that they’ve put into the project. You have to follow and abide by this law.
So if you do not do that, coming in to do a large scale project without taking into account the law, then you’ll find that you will not get the letter of no objection from the government to allow for your project to proceed. And secondly, the Kenya government will not give you a letter of authorization of or approval to then go sell the projects in the compliance or the voluntary carbon markets. So understanding the law and respecting the law in these African countries is going to be paramount for any project developer doing this. And if you cannot do that, you cannot scale and your project will not succeed and therefore you cannot sell the carbon credit.
So these are factors when you’re working in Africa, you have to be very diligent and have a good team that supports you. So, luckily on the Consuming Carbon team, we have a very strong team in Kenya that is working directly with the community. We have very strong partners that allow for us to successfully do this with the community. And then alongside that, we also have a very strong team here in the United States, that is building up the platform that is going to address the last mile for each of these stakeholders to ensure that the information that each of them is having is specific to their role and is allowing for them to get the most credible information, trustworthy information to represent their part of the carbon markets and the projects that we’re trying to do, in order for a buyer to confidently then purchase these credits that have been given the approval to be sold on the market.
So this is how we’re going about it. And I believe those are the key areas that, you know, for success in this market, you need to have all that alongside managing the complexity and having the right people in roles that can cover, you know, the diverse areas that we’re looking at here to successfully implement these projects.
Sarah Johnson (35:31)
Thanks for sharing that, Nzioki. A lot of really great insights in there, just helping us understand all that there is to navigate with projects like these. And you know what I love about these reforestation, afforestation, and agroforestry carbon offset projects is just the number of levels of impact that a project can have. So I want to talk about community impact. Research suggests projects with verified community impact can command premiums of 50 to 80 percent more and we’re talking about the price of the carbon credit, the price that the credit can be sold for. You’ve suggested the multiplier can be even higher. Where does that come from in your experience?
Nzioki Munyao (36:17)
That’s a fantastic question and it avails the opportunity here because in Africa obviously the poverty again is one that diminishes healthcare, education, clean water as three examples of areas where just as a regular human being these should be available to you. And in the carbon markets, if you’re able to create additionality, additionality is yes, we found barren soil and we planted these bamboo and now the bamboo have created a carbon sequestration but also created a canopy and a forest and an ecosystem now for the community.
But then on top of it we also built a school. And the school is now providing education for, you know, in an example, there’s a school that we helped build by my one of the farms in Wamunyu, Kenya, called Mbaikini Girls High School. This is a girls’ High School that did not exist and because of the community and us coming together and collaborating, now the girls who previously would not have a High School opportunity or an opportunity to go to High School, now have a High School that they can go to. That is additionality.
Additionality is taking a project and then figuring out within this community that is helping us with climate action, where can we help? And for consuming carbon, some of the things that we have found that we can help in some of the revenues that we receive from the project and also following the guidelines of the Kenya law on the carbon markets, there is anywhere from 25 to 40 percent needs to go back to the community. So we have chosen to look at additionality in education and clean water.
So, some of the projects that we plan on working on include building schools in these communities that we’re working with and also building wells or pumping water to communities that don’t have clean running water. We have done this previously through philanthropic work that I am part of. And this is a passion that we create impact through the philanthropy in Sub-Saharan Africa. And because of this additionality, Sarah, then you find that the carbon project has significant impact on real people in a place of need.
And when you’re purchasing the carbon credits for this project, for example, if an airline is purchasing these credits, you will find that even though their greenhouse gas emissions are pretty high, you know, having a project of this type of quality where the additionality is so premium in the fact that you’re providing either clean water or education in our case, then that carbon credit does command a much higher price. And therefore that’s where it comes from. Real impact on the ground that you can prove that creates additionality on top of the sequestration of carbon that is coming from the planting of the bamboo or Biochar in the cases that we are discussing on this call today.
Sarah Johnson (39:26)
Thank you for sharing that, Nzioki. I just love these projects for all of the reasons you mentioned, and I’m so excited to hear that you’re doing work in water, which is very much needed in many regions around the world. So I wanna talk a bit about now just the potential that a large-scale deployment of projects like these could have on the African continent as a whole. We know that Africa holds a massive share of the world’s natural carbon removal potential, but captures very little of its financial value. You’re trying to change that from inside a single company, starting from one county in Kenya. Is that a realistic ambition? And what would actually have to change in the system beyond what consuming carbon is building for the content to claim its share?
Nzioki Munyao (40:18)
Another great question. I love these questions, Sarah. So to scale this operation in Africa, number one, the laws have to be in place so that way we have guidance for each of the countries that we’re working in. And Kenya has set a great example of this by creating the laws around the carbon markets, and we have to applaud that because globally Kenya is one of the best use cases of the carbon markets. So in the Kenya law, just to give you a couple examples here.
If you’re working on this project with a community, so this is a community based project, then the community would get 40 percent of the proceeds once you sell the carbon credits from there. So if a community comes in, so let’s use the example of the 6,000 acres that we’re working with, this community of 3,000 farmers, then if we receive, let’s just say, a million dollars from this project, the community stands to make $400,000, which then they can pump into large projects. You know, there’s so much that you can do with the community with that type of money in Africa because the dollar does go much further in these communities and the need is so high.
So having leadership on the ground that is at the multiple levels to address, you know, money like this coming back into the community, creates some organization around it, and then creates impact on the ground. So the things that we were just talking about, like the healthcare piece and the education and just the basic needs of human beings would be covered around that. So the revenue back to the community is a big thing because they’re doing the work, they’re cleaning up the planet, and now they’re getting some benefits not only monetarily, but also from the the project they’re able to have better facilities for them to grow, learn, and just subsist through some of the avenues that they’re being provided by.
Government support is also critical. You know, when we were talking to some of the leadership in Busilla County, for example, the governor and you know some of the key stakeholders, you know, they were asking, you know, what do we need to put into the project so that way this project can be a success because they know the benefit the people are going to get. Now, that was a great question coming from the government of Busilla County and we highly respect them. And we’re coming up with a framework that we will follow, collectively, from the community to the government to Consuming Carbon and all the other stakeholders will follow this framework in order to have a great template that the Busilla County government along with all the community players, the actual farmers and the landowners, can follow.
Because if we successfully can do this and distribute everything according to the Kenya law, following the registries and the regulations that are governed by the Paris Treaty and selling to buyers who are looking to be part of this project. When you create that ecosystem in that transaction around climate action, then you’re very quickly able to use that template and scale it. So think of a subscription model where we just use the same template where we engage the communities around Sub-Saharan Africa, where these regulations are allowing for us to have a very streamlined way of implementing it, then the community will benefit both financially and with benefits on top of that, like clean water, healthcare, education. And you can scale that across the African continent. And if you can do that, then there’s also the products that they are able to sell as a community.
Bamboo, for example, has many byproducts. And these byproducts we’ve seen in these communities, they’re being used for carvings, furniture, toothpicks, things that we can export into the international market. So think of, you know, Africa now having the production ability from farmers who previously just had land with no use for it that generated enough money to being manufacturing hubs where now they can provide goods and services out to markets in the West, and now it would change the economy, it would change the ecosystems, it would improve upon the planet because Africa has the potential of being able to help with the reduction of greenhouse gases through the sequestration through these projects and the carbon markets and buyers in the West can help support that. So if we use this model well, then Africa stands to benefit greatly from the farmer all the way up to the government. And these frameworks, leadership, guidance and collaboration then will bring the trust integrity.
And once you have the bind of the people, as I previously mentioned, then you’ll find that it’s very easy to drive this forward with many communities in Africa because we know for sure as we work with the different stakeholders on the ground in Malawi, Uganda, even Nigeria, all of them are saying the same thing. Show me how I’m going to benefit from this and I’ll put in the work because I need the work. And if we can do this for the African people, the African people will show up. They’re some of the hardest working people that just need the opportunity and we believe here at Consuming Carbon that they’re the ones who will stand to greatly benefit once they do the work and we’re here to make it happen.
Sarah Johnson (45:51)
Thanks so much for sharing that, Nzioki. So excited by your vision and the work that Consuming Carbon is doing. And so thank you so much again for joining us and sharing both your expertise and the personal journey behind your work. What stands out for me is how you’re bringing together climate action, technology, and community prosperity from bamboo, Biochar, and regenerative agriculture to the technology behind Pamoja DMRV that enables all of this and helps make carbon markets more transparent and trustworthy. Your work for me clearly demonstrates that the communities doing the climate work can also be the ones who benefit from it. So we thank you once again for your time, for joining us for the work you’re doing to build practical community-centered climate solutions. And also thanks to our listeners for joining us for another episode of the Pathway Podcast.