Africa’s climate story is a paradox. The continent contributes less than 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet it faces some of the harshest consequences of climate change: worsening droughts in the Horn of Africa, destructive floods in West Africa, and rising sea levels threatening coastal cities like Lagos and Dar es Salaam. At the same time, Africa holds some of the world’s largest carbon sinks, from the Congo Basin rainforest to vast mangrove ecosystems that are critical for global climate stability.
Even with this importance, Africa captures only about 3% of global climate finance. Most capital for sustainability projects is either slow to arrive, lost in bureaucratic layers, or diverted toward programs with weak local accountability. That hole has left governments, NGOs, and communities searching for new ways to fund and verify climate action.
This uneven landscape is why Africa is becoming a testbed for blockchain-driven climate finance. Where traditional systems have struggled, blockchain pilots are arising as experiments to link community-level climate action with digital verification and potential access to global markets.
Why climate finance struggles in Africa
The traditional climate finance model is heavily intermediated. Money flows from global institutions to national governments, then trickles down through agencies before reaching projects on the ground. Each layer slows disbursement and weakens accountability. By the time funds arrive at the village where trees are planted or waste is collected, monitoring is usually superficial and reporting is hard to verify.
Auditors and watchdogs have pointed out problems: inflated project numbers, ghost tree planting schemes, carbon credits counted twice, and recycling volumes that exist only on paper. For investors or corporates looking to support climate initiatives in Africa, the lack of verifiable data is a barrier. For local communities, it means many initiatives collapse once donor funding dries up.
This is the situation against which blockchain is being tested, as a tool not to replace on-the-ground work, but to provide a transparent, auditable layer for recording, verifying, and potentially monetizing community-level climate actions.
Fedrok’s entry: signaling strategy, not charity
One of the clearest signals of how seriously blockchain players are taking Africa came earlier this year when Fedrok AG, a Swiss blockchain firm focused on climate finance infrastructure, appointed James Mulbah to its leadership team. Mulbah is a Liberian environmental entrepreneur with a track record in waste management and green startups.
His hire showed that Fedrok is treating Africa not as a peripheral market but as a strategic hub for piloting its climate finance infrastructure. The company is not running farms or waste programs directly; instead, it is building the rails: a blockchain network with a “Proof of Green” consensus that rewards miners for using renewable energy, along with tokenization and verification tools that local partners can plug into.
FarmRight in Ghana
One pilot now underway is with FarmRight, an agribusiness operating in Ghana since 2017. Agriculture is one of the sectors most exposed to climate shocks on the continent: unpredictable rains, soil degradation, and food insecurity have all worsened in recent years.
In partnership with Fedrok, the company is introducing on-chain verification aimed especially at labour compliance in cocoa and palm oil farming. The goal is to ensure worker age verification, prevent child labour, and improve transparency in the supply chain. While some media reports suggest environmental metrics (such as sustainable farming practices) may also be integrated, the project’s confirmed scope focuses more tightly on labour and ethical sourcing. Fedrok provides the blockchain infrastructure, immutable records, audits, and verification tools, while FarmRight supplies the on-ground agribusiness operations.
For farmers, the potential long-term value is access to new finance streams tied to verified sustainability practices. For observers, the point is that blockchain is being tested as a verification and trust mechanism, not as a replacement for the hard work of growing food in difficult conditions.
Greentsika in Madagascar
A second pilot highlights a very different challenge: waste. Greentsika, a social enterprise in Madagascar, has partnered with Fedrok to test a “cash-for-trash” model.
Here, community members bring recyclable waste to collection points. Instead of paper receipts or unverifiable weight slips, each transaction is recorded digitally and can be bridged into Fedrok’s blockchain network. Tokens stand in for the environmental value of the recycling action, creating a tamper-proof record of what was collected, by whom, and when.
Madagascar is not usually the first country that comes to mind for blockchain pilots. But that is part of the story: it illustrates how Africa’s mix of urgent sustainability challenges and weak traditional finance rails creates fertile ground for experimentation. If blockchain-backed recycling credits can work in Toliara, they could work in other underserved cities globally.
Testing infrastructure, not declaring victory
It’s crucial to emphasize that these are pilots. No one is claiming that blockchain has already solved Africa’s climate finance gap. The FarmRight and Greentsika projects are experiments designed to answer practical questions:
- Can blockchain records make climate action more auditable at the community level?
- Can local organizations integrate tokenization tools without heavy technical expertise?
- Will corporates or climate finance providers treat these digitally verified credits as more trustworthy than paper-based systems?
In this sense, Fedrok’s moves, from the leadership hire to these pilots, are less about immediate impact and more about stress-testing infrastructure in environments where traditional systems have failed.
Why Africa as a proving ground?
Africa’s climate finance gap is not just a problem, it is also an opportunity. The very absence of entrenched legacy systems means new approaches can be tried without displacing billion-dollar incumbents. Community organizations are used to working with patchwork funding and are often open to new models that promise more transparency.
There is also cultural and political momentum. From pan-African climate summits to youth-led recycling movements, there is a readiness to test new ideas, especially if they can unlock external funding or give communities greater visibility in global sustainability markets.
If blockchain-based verification tools prove workable here, in environments with limited infrastructure, high vulnerability, and skeptical funders, they may set trends for broader global use.
Closing insight: Proof of concept on the world’s toughest stage
Africa’s role as an early laboratory for blockchain climate finance is less about hype and more about necessity. Traditional finance has left a hole, communities cannot wait for perfect systems to be designed in Geneva or Washington.
Fedrok’s pilots with FarmRight and Greentsika are not definitive solutions, but they illustrate what it looks like when blockchain is used as infrastructure instead of marketing. If transparent, auditable records of recycling or farming practices can be created and trusted in these contexts, the implications extend well beyond Africa.
In that sense, Africa may again play a role it has before in technology adoption, leapfrogging legacy systems. Just as mobile money scaled in Africa before it took off elsewhere, blockchain-backed climate finance may find its most rigorous early testing not in New York or Zurich, but in Nairobi, Antananarivo, and Monrovia.
For crypto-native readers, the signal is clear: if blockchain can deliver verifiable trust in the most resource-constrained climate contexts, it won’t remain a pilot for long.
