xneelo’s responsiveness and ability to tailor their offering around what we need seems unusual, but is very useful to me.
Xneelo customer, Credible Carbon, helps link the global carbon market with poverty-alleviating projects in Africa.
Carbon credits help companies that emit a certain level of carbon dioxide to offset their emissions by encouraging them to invest in eco-friendly projects.
This practice was outlined in The United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), defined in Article 12 of the Kyoto Protocol, which allows countries or businesses committed to lowering their emissions to implement emission-reduction projects in developing countries.
Bringing the carbon trade to Africa
The company started out as an NGO in 2005 but found its purpose much later when it became clear that the CDM was not channelling carbon market investment to African countries.
Director Anton Cartwright explains: “We started the business when we realised that the global carbon market was not likely to support the types of small, poverty-alleviating projects we were working within Sub-Saharan Africa. We wanted to show that these projects could make themselves legible and visible to buyers without incurring the hefty transaction costs required by the UN system.”
Today, Credible Carbon successfully verifies, issues and trades carbon credits from poverty alleviation projects in Sub-Saharan Africa.
“We were lucky in the sense that at more or less the same time, the world started asking ‘Why are there no carbon credits from Africa?’” says Anton.
Fighting poverty and pollution
Anton says everyone at Credible Carbon takes their name seriously and that projects are meticulously vetted to ensure all their requirements are met.
“We are motivated by what we understand to be the conjoined challenge of decarbonisation (avoiding catastrophic climate change) and poverty alleviation. We support projects that do both of these things at the same time by providing them with affordable access to the carbon market.”
Using the web to promote transparency
Because their website would need to constantly change and shift according to the needs of the business, Credible Carbon chose xneelo for the robustness of our systems.
“Our website is everything. We use it to create awareness and to run the registry that ensures no credits are double counted and every transaction is backed up by an audit trail,” explains Anton.
Help others and they will help you
Anton has one piece of serious advice to share with entrepreneurs wanting to start companies with similar altruistic missions.
“If your business is trying to help people or solve societal problems, it will remain interesting and rewarding and will always have customers. The moment it becomes about your needs as the entrepreneur, it is dead.”
I love the fact that, like us, xneelo is a South African company and that when we have queries we can actually get hold of someone.
Read about another xneelo customer making a difference for the environment here.
