What is the name of your organization?
EarthAcre
What is the name of your solution?
EarthAcre Platform
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
A digital platform to get Indigenous landowners paid for nature stewardship via automated verification and traceable, direct household payouts
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Chicago, IL, USA
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
United States
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
Indigenous communities steward up to 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity. Unfortunately, these efforts are hindered by systemic data and trust gaps. Fragmented, paper-based records create a “data ceiling” that restricts capital flow, resulting in untraceable, group-level disbursements prone to elite capture. Without transparent financial systems linking households directly to capital, community members cannot access credit, micro-loans, or climate safety nets like livestock insurance. Today, indigenous communities receive less than 1% of international nature finance.
For example, the African safari industry is valued at $38 billion (projected to hit $67 billion by 2033) and depends on community-held open lands. Today, structural data gaps mean only a tiny fraction of this capital reaches frontline stewards at the household level. The same is true for growing carbon and biodiversity markets. Lacking predictable direct income, households face hard choices: selling ancestral plots or turning to destructive alternatives like charcoal burning and sand harvesting. This triggers habitat conversion, wildlife collapse, and forced migration. Resilience is lost for the most vulnerable, particularly women and youth systemically sidelined from conventional financial systems.
Addressing this trust and data gap is urgent to route nature capital directly to individual stewards, making verified conservation an economically viable land-use choice.
What is your solution?
The EarthAcre platform provides the digital infrastructure for nature-based projects, starting with tourism, to bridge trust and data gaps and connect indigenous landowners directly to nature finance. Our technology features three layers:
- Traceability of financial flows: We digitize the Free, Prior, Informed Consent process used by projects to engage communities and map land polygons to individual household mobile-money credentials. This enables flexible benefit-sharing tools to communities, mitigating the risk of elite capture and building trust for commercial operators and community members. Our platform provides end-to-end transparency of direct payments.
- Outcomes-based monitoring: In collaboration with Harvard’s Davies Lab, we deploy a scalable AI-driven Biodiversity Capacity metric. This system integrates remote sensing, bioacoustics, and camera traps to monitor and verify ecological impact of interventions. By replacing static proxies of nature with dynamic, outcome-based metrics, we enable project developers to drive new revenue sources.
- Unlocking nature finance: The auditable data in our platform allows project developers, such as ecotourism partners, to layer and "stack" multiple revenue streams onto the same land. By transforming stewardship into high-integrity nature assets like carbon and biodiversity credits, we unlock international capital for nature.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
We serve indigenous and pastoralist communities living across critical, biodiverse landscapes. These communities are systematically marginalized by global nature finance. They are underserved because legacy systems route funds through opaque “group-level” committees prone to elite capture. Additionally, a large proportion of women and youth lack formal land titles, locking them out of access to capital from nature markets. Simultaneously, project developers and safari operators increasingly require rigorous socio-ecological data to access these financial markets. EarthAcre’s platform resolves this by placing communities at the center of nature finance.
Our solution converts intentional stewardship into predictable income for historically vulnerable, unmapped families — previous direct payments powered by EarthAcre have resulted in a 20% income uplift. By providing the digital architecture for traceable layering of revenue streams, open rangeland management becomes a viable economic choice. Consequently, communities no longer face pressure to partition, fence, degrade ancestral lands to meet their daily livelihoods. Longer-term, establishing clear digital financial footprints creates a gateway to secondary financial services, such as livestock insurance and education policies, building socioeconomic resilience against climate stressors
