The CARBON Copy (CC) team recently spoke with Kennedy Ng'ang'a, founder of ecological data platform Shamba Network. In this two-part interview, Kennedy sheds light on anticipatory cash transfers, dMRV, and his thoughts on the state of ReFi in Kenya and beyond.

Part one of this interview can be found here.

CC: Let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about Web3 and climate impact. In your mind, where can Web3 solutions have the biggest impact on the climate?

Kennedy: Yeah, so I think number one is in the area of regeneration. Web3 can play a very big role in helping to unlock resources for regeneration. And here I'm not just thinking about carbon, I'm thinking of how we can regenerate agricultural landscapes, how we can regenerate natural landscapes.

So I think through the mechanisms that Web3 unlocks and even the kind of transparency it offers to things like the carbon markets, it allows a lot of resources to potentially be unlocked and sent into regeneration so that we can be able to deal with the climate change issue. But there's also a lot of land degradation issues that are happening in places like Africa, and we believe that a lot of this can be mitigated if the resources for it are made available.

Number two is climate resilience and adaptation. As I mentioned, a lot of communities, especially in the global south, are affected adversely by climate change. I see Web3 playing a very pivotal role in how aid is given to these people, so they can adapt to some of these issues and become more resilient, so that a climate shock doesn't come in and financially wipe out an entire household. Through Web3 mechanisms you can give at least a certain level of safety net that will protect these people.

CC: dMRV has been one of the main topics of discussion in terms of Web3 and climate impact. What do you see as the most challenging aspect of the transition to digital monitoring, reporting, and verification (dMRV)?

Kennedy: I think the challenging aspect of dMRV is the certain costs that are involved. For instance, a lot of dMRV, especially the kind we work with at Shamba Network uses a lot of remote sensing data. We use very high resolution satellite imagery. A lot of the time, this is commercial data that has to be bought at a premium, so there is going to be a challenge with how to scale dMRV and such technologies to cover very huge areas if the unit cost of the data that goes into these things is still quite high.

I think we are still at the early stages of this whole thing. I do believe that satellite data, IoT data and all this other sensor data will become cheaper as we move along, even the soil probes and everything else.

CC: Moving on to ReFi, we know there are quite a few definitions of regenerative finance out there. How would you describe it?

Kennedy: Well, I think of ReFi as basically a financial and economic paradigm that allows us to put environmental or natural matters at the centre of business. This is a big shift from the traditional system, which was very extractive. In the traditional capitalist economy, it's all about how much can you take out of a place? How much can you take out of the ground? How many resources can you extract? And how can you be moved to use that to build your own wealth? This is the maximisation mindset at the expense of the environment, and this is what has led to some of the problems which we have right now, like climate change.

With ReFi, we are thinking about this new economic paradigm, so that when people are making decisions about how we increase GDP and how we improve development, it is never at the expense of the environment. It's about how we do all of these things while still preserving the environment and making it sustainable for future generations.

CC: Is there a sense that Africa is the logical epicentre of ReFi given its long history as a victim of exploitation and resource extraction?

Kennedy: Yes, I think that is part of the reason. Traditionally, as you’ve rightly pointed out, the global south has been suffering under an extractive paradigm. As a result, we’ve seen a lot of problems, both ecological and socioeconomic. Africa is a very natural place for ReFi because it allows people to start dealing with some of those issues. It allows our societies, communities, and ecosystems to recover and move away from the extractive mindset.

Another reason is that a lot of the global natural capital, especially the ecological capital, is held in the global south. So when you think of huge forests, arable land, and freshwater, a lot of it is in places like Africa and Latin America. The ReFi paradigm works very well here because these things can be protected and ecosystem value can be created.

CC: As we know, ReFi is about more than just carbon. What other areas are you excited about and what kind of potential do you see in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa?

Kennedy: Aside from carbon, other areas that are going to be really important in Africa moving forward are in regard to things like biodiversity. There is a huge role for ReFi to play to safeguard this biodiversity, our national parks, and our wildlife and make them sustainable for future generations.

Other areas that I see as important for regeneration are things like soil, agricultural land, and water resources. All of these things have been degraded because for the last 50-70 years, people have been doing a lot of chemically intensive farming, using synthetic fertilisers. The soil is getting exhausted, streams are getting ruined. The regeneration of these assets is going to be very important, especially when we consider the fact that most of the population growth is focused in the global south. The issue of food security is a very big issue and one that ties very closely with regeneration of agricultural land.

CC: What about areas like universal basic income and cultural preservation?

Kennedy: Yes, I am very bullish on ReFi impacting those areas. There are a number of projects that I follow closely that deal with the preservation of local languages. For instance, in Kenya we have Kamusi DAO which is looking at how the ReFi mindset can be married to the Swahili language and culture that is here and how it can help to preserve that.

I think the preservation of culture, language, and history can all be impacted very strongly by ReFi. It’s a good point to bring up because when we think about ReFi, it isn’t just about physical things. Things like culture can benefit from regeneration as well.

CC: You recently organised the ReFi Kenya event in September. We hope to get there for next year’s event. How did this one go?

Kennedy: Thank you. You’re most welcome next year. We always love having new guests there.

The goal of ReFi Kenya has always been to grow the ReFi community within the country. This year’s event was really nice because we had representation from a lot of different areas. We had people working on projects that target mangroves, beach cleanups, agroforestry, and tree planting. We also had Web3 organisations that are not necessarily working with land stewards but they are part of the ecosystem. Filecoin Green and Treegens came, we had new projects such as Aquapurge coming through. And so we had quite a number of builders.

But the bigger number was actually the land stewards, the people doing the activity on the ground, planting trees and so on. We had a lot of them sharing their enthusiasm, the work they’ve been doing, what they’ve been able to achieve, and exchanging knowledge with other land stewards.

This year, we also announced the launch of a new feature within ReFi Kenya. We are calling it the ReFi Kenya Awards. It aims to acknowledge, appreciate, and celebrate the builders and land stewards who have done a lot in a particular year, and to encourage people to continue doing the great work that they do.

CC: Can you tell us about your vision for tokenised ecological assets and how you see them being utilised by the average person?

Kennedy: The tokenisation of ecological assets is something that has begun and will become the dominant paradigm in the next couple of years. And we see it as something that can unlock a lot of value for land stewards and people doing regenerative activity because now you have a paradigm where all of this activity can be represented on-chain and can be made available to anyone that needs to inspect it. And so this is a new kind of asset that people will have access to much more quickly than they are traditionally used to. They will also have an on-chain record of how many trees were planted and how much carbon was sequestered.

It’s important to mention that the smallholder farmers we work with are typically excluded from the traditional financial system. Once they have these new tokenised assets, it opens up a whole new world of financial services that they didn’t have access to before.

CC: One final question for you. Aside from the pilot project, what’s up next for Shamba Network over the next 6 months or so?

Kennedy: We have a lot to look forward to. One of the biggest things we’re aiming for is being able to onboard more farmers into regeneration. We have a huge waitlist that we are onboarding, including farmer community groups and grassroots partners that we can work with. Our aim is to hit maybe 1 million trees within the next year in terms of what has been planted on agricultural land. We can also start measuring not just the carbon credits but also looking at other aspects of regeneration like biodiversity, soil, and water, which are all very important to the people we work with.

We did an analysis and found that the farmers we work with have an interest in regeneration beyond the carbon income they can get. They also want to be able to improve their land and get even more productivity from it. We are excited about building the tools to help these farmers to achieve some of the things that matter to them.

Finally, over the next couple of months, we hope to get some of the carbon credits from our earlier projects to market.

CC: Thanks for taking the time to speak with us, Kennedy. Best of luck with Shamba Network and the pilot project. Hope to see you at the ReFi Kenya event next year!



The answers in this article are the personal opinions of Mr. Ng'ang'a and do not necessarily reflect the views of Shamba Network.