In This Brief
Kilimora has won the Second UNCTAD Supply Chain Innovation Challenge. The win rests on an idea that research, earlier pioneers and our climate project development partner MicroEnergy Credits all support: smallholder farmers are shut out of climate finance less by a lack of good practice than by the cost of proving it.
The Second UNCTAD Supply Chain Innovation Challenge asked innovators worldwide how frontier technology can help supply chains anticipate, withstand and recover from disruption. UNCTAD received 623 proposals. Kilimora's entry, Cooperative Edge, was named the winner. It describes how AgriKonnekt combines satellite intelligence, IoT soil monitoring and digital farm records so that a cooperative can show, plot by plot, what its members are doing on the land.
This brief is the short version of the story. The rest of it looks at why verification matters, what the research and the numbers say about its cost, which pioneers built the ground we stand on, and how our partner MicroEnergy Credits turns verified records into carbon finance.
What the challenge asked
The challenge sits inside the UNCTAD Global Supply Chain Forum, which UN Trade and Development holds every two years as a platform for public and private dialogue on supply chains and trade logistics. The first Forum took place in Bridgetown, Barbados, in 2024. The second will be held in Riyadh from 29 November to 1 December 2026, in partnership with the Saudi Ports Authority (Mawani), and the winning solution will be presented there to policymakers, industry leaders and supply chain experts.
The 2026 theme was frontier technology in countering supply chain disruptions. Proposals were judged on how far they could make supply chains more resilient, sustainable, inclusive, efficient and adaptable. That framing suits agriculture, because a supply chain can only be as resilient as its first link, and the first link is a farm that finance rarely reaches.
The money does not match the problem
Climate finance and carbon markets both depend on measurement. A buyer, a lender or an insurer needs to know what happened on a plot before money moves. The Climate Policy Initiative and the ClimateShot Investor Coalition give a sense of why this matters. Their 2025 landscape found that agrifood systems received 7.2 percent of tracked global climate finance in 2021 and 2022, just short of US$95 billion a year. Earlier CPI work noted that the same systems are responsible for almost a third of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The 2025 landscape also shows who pays. Public finance supplied US$73.8 billion, or 78 percent of the total, which means private capital still plays a small part in the climate transition of food systems. That is an opportunity as much as a gap, since private lenders and carbon buyers tend to move when risk can be measured.
For the smallest farmers the squeeze is tighter still. IFAD and the Climate Policy Initiative found that only about 1.7 percent of climate finance reaches small scale farmers, roughly US$10 billion a year out of more than US$500 billion, even though these farmers produce about half of the world's food calories. Estimates cited by AGRA suggest that fewer than 1 percent of rural households in Africa can reach formal credit for inputs.
What the literature says about proof
Researchers at UCLouvain, Van der Heyden and Van den Broeck, built a cost model for four monitoring systems used in carbon farming: decision support tools, remote sensing models, process based models and direct soil measurement. They found large cost differences depending on the approach, the project design and the protocol, and warned that these costs can become a burden on farmers. Digitalisation and remote sensing hold promise for cutting them, but the authors conclude that policy support is likely needed to make monitoring scalable for smaller farms.
Work presented at Tropentag 2024 by Okoli and colleagues reached a similar view from the field. Using the Western Kenya Soil Carbon Project as a case study, they compared nine ways of accounting for soil organic carbon in smallholder projects. Remote sensing showed promise for lowering measurement costs, though transparency is essential, and involving communities in monitoring can lower costs further while building farmers' own skills.
A 2026 survey of carbon farming adds the structural point. Smallholder plots are usually too fragmented to produce credits cost effectively on their own, and cooperatives that pool land and records bring down the per farmer cost of monitoring and verification. This is the logic behind the name Cooperative Edge.
The pioneers who proved the model
Kilimora did not start from nothing. One clear precedent is the Kenya Agricultural Carbon Project in western Kenya, implemented by the Swedish organisation Vi Agroforestry with support from the World Bank's BioCarbon Fund. In January 2014 it issued the first credits anywhere under the sustainable agricultural land management methodology, representing 24,788 tonnes of carbon dioxide. The project involved about 60,000 farmers on 45,000 hectares, and the methodology asked farmers themselves to take part in monitoring.
The results reported by the World Bank were encouraging for farmers: maize yields tripled over three years in the project area, more than 30,000 smallholders were trained, and farmers received US$65,000 in carbon revenue. The project also included the first emissions reduction purchase agreement signed for an African soil carbon project. At the same time, later reviews noted that direct carbon payments to farmers were low. That is the lesson for the next generation of projects. When the payment per farmer is small, a heavy verification bill can consume it, so cheaper and faster proof is what turns a proof of concept into a viable market.
A second pioneer came from the finance side. MicroEnergy Credits, founded in Seattle in 2007, set out to link microfinance institutions to carbon markets when they lend for clean energy. Its best known early deal paired Citi with Mongolia's XacBank, where household emission savings from insulation and efficient stoves were assigned to MicroEnergy Credits, quantified and aggregated, and sold. The 2013 agreement was expected to deliver at least 1.17 million tonnes of credits over six years and to reach 100,000 households, with proceeds returning to the bank so that it could lend more.
A partner built for the last mile
MicroEnergy Credits is Kilimora's climate project development partner, and its record explains why. It works as a financial intermediary between local lenders and the carbon market, it operates in Sub Saharan Africa, and from its early days it has tracked installations with mobile phones, GPS and the internet so that buyers can trust what they are paying for. A project developer carries a farm level record through registration, quantification and sale, which is the stage where many smallholder ideas stall.
The two halves of the work fit together. AgriKonnekt produces the cheap, continuous, plot level evidence. MicroEnergy Credits brings the project development experience to turn that evidence into credits that buyers recognise, and to return the proceeds to the people who produced them.
What our own pilot adds
Kilimora's contribution begins in the field. In 2024 the team worked with 1,500 farmers across Kenya, including in Murang'a, to test whether AI enabled digital tools could make verification cheaper. The research evidence from that pilot points to a verification cost reduction of about 70 percent, alongside an estimated 24,000 tonnes of carbon sequestered each year across the enrolled cooperative plots. These are pilot scale estimates, and the plan for the next phase is to keep testing them as the network grows.
The approach has also been tested by outside judges. In 2025 Kilimora was selected as a beVisioneers Pioneer Project Scholar, funded by Mercedes-Benz and implemented by The DO, and the MK-Africa #MyLittleBigThing Challenge recognised the work as the most bankable project in the eyes of ABSA Bank. The UNCTAD win adds an international policy audience to a record that began with farmers and cooperatives.
The road to 2030
Kilimora's published plan is to grow from 1,500 farmers in 2026 to 50,000 by 2030 across Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, using a cooperative cascade in which each new network trains its own farmer educators. The same plan targets 180,000 verified tonnes of carbon a year by 2030, with BioCarbon Standard certification aimed for 2027. The step from pilot to target is steep, and it is the reason verification costs have to fall: no project developer can serve tens of thousands of smallholders with manual field visits.
Why a supply chain challenge
It may seem unusual for a climate finance idea to win a supply chain prize, but the two are the same problem seen from different ends. Buyers, lenders and regulators increasingly ask where a product came from and what it did to the land. A cooperative that holds satellite records, soil readings and digital farm logs can answer those questions for every member, and the same record can support a loan, an insurance trigger or a carbon credit. Visibility at the first link lowers risk for every link after it, which is the resilience the challenge was designed to reward.
What to do next
- Cooperatives. Keep plot level records from the start of a season, so that evidence builds up as a by product of normal farming rather than as a separate audit task.
- Lenders and insurers. Treat a verified cooperative record as a basis for credit and index cover, and price the lower cost of proof into the offer.
- Project developers and carbon buyers. Work with cooperatives and local institutions, as MicroEnergy Credits does, so that credits are backed by records and proceeds return to the people who earned them.
- Standards bodies. Keep widening the room for remote sensing and digital records, with ground calibration, so that smallholder projects are not priced out by monitoring costs.
- Policymakers and development partners. Fund shared verification infrastructure for cooperatives, as the research suggests policy support is needed for smaller farms to benefit.
The story of this win is encouraging because it is a continuation. Pioneers in western Kenya and in microfinance showed that low income households can earn from carbon markets. Researchers have shown where the costs sit. The task now is to make proof cheap enough that the farmer keeps the benefit, and the first stop on that road is the Global Supply Chain Forum in Riyadh.
Sources: UNCTAD, Second Supply Chain Innovation Challenge and Global Supply Chain Forum 2026 pages; Climate Policy Initiative and ClimateShot Investor Coalition, Landscape of Climate Finance for Agrifood Systems, 2023 and 2025; IFAD and Climate Policy Initiative, Examining the Climate Finance Gap for Small Scale Agriculture, 2020; AGRA; Van der Heyden and Van den Broeck, What MRV systems can reduce costs and enhance scalability of carbon farming, UCLouvain, 2025; Okoli and colleagues, Smallholder agriculture takes root in climate action, Tropentag, 2024; Carbon Farming: An Expository, Inter Disciplinary Survey, arXiv 2603.20674, 2026; World Bank, Kenyans earn first ever carbon credits from sustainable farming, 21 January 2014, and Kenya SALM results brief; Verra, 2014; CGIAR Climate Smart Agriculture Guide; Citi and XacBank announcement on the MicroEnergy Credits agreement, 2013; Wesleyan Magazine profile of MicroEnergy Credits, 2010; Clean Cooking Alliance directory entry for MicroEnergy Credits; Kilimora pilot records and strategic vision. Pilot figures and 2030 figures are Kilimora estimates and targets. The cost chart shows an index. The partner graphic is an illustration. Chart values are rounded.
