Africa's Voluntary Carbon Market: From Promise to Performance

The voluntary carbon market (VCM) has undergone a turbulent decade. After years of explosive growth, 2023 and 2024 saw significant credibility challenges as investigations raised questions about the additionality and permanence of some of the largest credit programmes. Yet demand from corporate net-zero commitments continues to grow, and Africa's natural ecosystems offer some of the most cost-effective and co-benefit-rich mitigation opportunities available anywhere on the planet.

Despite housing more than 30% of global nature-based carbon potential — in the Congo Basin forests, the Sahel woodlands, mangroves along both coastlines, and vast peatlands in the East African highlands — Africa captures fewer than five cents in every dollar of voluntary carbon market revenue. The reasons are structural: high transaction costs of project development and verification; fragmented land-tenure systems that complicate rights identification; limited access to concessional project-preparation finance; and a shortage of local technical capacity to develop and manage carbon projects.

The Article 6 architecture of the Paris Agreement, still under active development, adds both opportunity and complexity. Bilateral Article 6.2 agreements between African governments and buyers in the EU, Japan, and elsewhere could channel sovereign-level carbon finance at a scale the voluntary market has never approached. But they also risk crowding out high-quality voluntary credits, particularly if host-country authorisation processes are slow or opaque.

CLEEN's analysis of 47 pipeline projects across 12 African countries suggests that the primary bottleneck is not demand but project-development finance. Projects with robust baseline data, clear community benefit-sharing structures, and credible monitoring plans consistently attract buyers — but reaching that stage requires patient, risk-tolerant capital that is currently scarce. Innovative blended-finance vehicles that de-risk early-stage development costs are the most promising near-term solution.

To unlock Africa's carbon potential, the continent needs indigenous project developers with deep local knowledge and relationships, a strengthened cadre of local auditors and verifiers, and national carbon registries that are transparent, interoperable, and aligned with international standards. CLEEN is actively contributing to all three — and the opportunity has never been larger.