What is the name of your organization?
Ecohub Solutions
What is the name of your solution?
GreenCarbon
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
AI powered carbon farming and soil carbon-credits trading platform for climate action and economic empowerment of women smallholder farmers in Kenya
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Nairobi, Kenya
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
Kenya
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?
Women in Kenya and other parts of the world are disproportionately affected by climate change. Women suffer the highest burden of declining agricultural productivity, economic hardships, hunger and malnutrition caused by climate change. At the same time agriculture sector is the second highest contributor of greenhouse-gases generating 18billion metric tons CO2 annually.
Despite this, women smallholder farmers (WSF) lack access to digitized agricultural climate-mitigation resources and climate-adaptation initiatives due to cultural, gender, capacity, financial and technological barriers.
This limits ability of WSF in adopting new farming technologies for mitigating climate-change, increasing agricultural productivity and increasing revenue from agriculture.
90% of the 6million WSF in Kenya lack skills in carbon farming and carbon trading, have limited access to high-tech smart-phones, internet connection, and have no credit history for financing.
They have limited access to digitized agro-climate information and advisory services such as weather forecast, and early-warning systems.
Moreover, WSF often have small, fragmented farms that don’t individually qualify for carbon credit programs thus locking them out of the carbon-market. Fortunately, Artificial Intelligence(AI) can aggregate fragmented agricultural-farms into large verifiable carbon-projects.
Solutions combining AI-tools with low-tech mobile-technology to eliminate digital, financial, and capacity barriers for this low-income WSF are urgently needed.
What is your solution?
We are providing an AI powered carbon farming and soil carbon credits trading platform for use by women smallholder farmers (WSF) in Kenya, empowering them with skills and opportunities for obtaining additional income, reducing carbon emissions, and increasing agricultural productivity to build resilience against socioeconomic shocks of climate-change.
Carbon farming (regenerative agriculture) involves managing land to help agricultural lands absorb and hold more carbon-dioxide than they emit.
GreenCarbon uses AI, low-tech mobile technology, and remote sensing to provide agro-climate and soil carbon-trading advisory to the women.
The AI platform is provided as web application, and low-tech USSD codes and SMSes.
AI driven agro-climate information on regenerative-agriculture, climate–smart practices, and carbon-trading support is provided to on-boarded WSF.
Machine Learning algorithms process large data sets and generate AI-driven tailored carbon-farming models and agro-advisory services specifically designed for women by considering cultural and gender barriers, and climate risks.
The information is sent to them via SMSes and USSD codes in near real-time.
Voice-based AI assistants in local languages are also provided for non/semi-literate WSF.
Mobile-based payments are used, which is critical because many WSF lack formal bank accounts.
GreenCarbon partners with mobile network provider, Airtel Kenya in providing the mobile-based services.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
GreenCarbon is designed to support low-income, 6 million women smallholder farmers (WSF) in Kenya who suffer the triple effects of limited capacity, digital exclusion, and financial exclusion that limit their participation in climate mitigation and adaptation initiatives.
GreenCarbon empowers the women with skills for tailored regenerative agriculture, climate-smart agriculture, and then provides them opportunities to translate their green-farming projects into carbon credits. This allows the low-income WSF obtain additional income streams to help build resilience against economic shocks of climate-change.
The additional income incentivizes the women to take up climate-friendly agricultural practices thus accelerating reduction of carbon emissions and increase agricultural productivity.
Payment for sale of carbon credits is done via mobile-money wallets helping the women build credit history for AI-powered carbon credits pre-financing and micro-credits based on credit scores built from farm data to unlock new financial opportunities.
GreenCarbon enables the technologically disadvantaged WSF acquire digital inclusion through low-tech mobile-based USSD and SMS which is farmer-friendly since women farmers often have limited access to high-tech smart-phones and internet.
Accelerated uptake of carbon farming and climate-smart agriculture leads to increased agricultural productivity thus improved food security and increased revenue.
GreenCarbon promotes nutritious global food systems and enhances carbon sequestration.
