INVITATION TO TENDER: help us to enable Ugandan smallholder farmers to access the international carbon market

The Frontier Technologies Hub and the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) are looking to work with a partner to develop a solution that can support existing Ugandan agribusinesses to learn how to overcome barriers to entry to enable them to supply and sell carbon credits on the international voluntary carbon market sustainably and at scale.

This pilot is part of the Frontier Technology livestreaming programme, where FCDO advisors apply for the opportunity to test an idea of an application of technology in a certain context. The Frontier Tech Hub matches these advisors with specialists in either the technology or problem area and coaches them to test potential solutions using lean and agile methods, with the aim of building a self-sustaining and scalable solution.

Sometimes these ideas come to us in their very early stages where perhaps we only have a surface-level understanding of the issues at hand and realise we have a lot more to learn in order to find a partner who is fully equipped to help support FCDO to realise their vision.

That was the case here. As we began reaching out to different actors in the field, it became apparent that there were a lot of actors operating in this space so what could our pilot add to this? Enter: the marketplace of ideas.

The Marketplace of Ideas

The Marketplace of Ideas workshops were designed by the FT Hub after being inspired by the Early Market Engagements often undertaken by the FCDO amongst other funding entities. They’re something we have tested a few times in the past, from the pay-as-you-go bikes pilot in Zambia to, most recently, the electrifying livelihoods pilot in Senegal.

As demonstrated in the examples above, the primary objective of these sessions was to bring stakeholders together to raise awareness of the pilot and generate ideas to feed into the Invitation to Tender (ITT) with the aim of finding the right team to turn the idea into a reality.

However, with so much work already being directed into the carbon market in Uganda, we wanted to use the Marketplace of Ideas as a way to surface diverse opinion through creating a space to bring a range of actors together who could collaboratively ‘unpick’ and build on the solution hypothesis we had formulated. In doing so, it enabled us to not only better understand the problem space but to see where this pilot might apply frontier tech in order to support or “supercharge” the activities of experts on the ground.

Synthesizing our inputs, our key learnings were that:

• The voluntary carbon market currently offers low incentives to attract smallholder farmers
• Smallholder farmers are required to commit to carbon sequestration activities long-term in order to garner the benefits but require a financial model that facilitates this
• Project developers face high costs in monitoring and verifying carbon sequestration projects, particularly in the context of fragmented land ownership
• Tech solutions are available to project developers but these are not always user friendly, affordable or fit-for-purpose
• Registering for carbon credit certification as a new organisation is time-consuming and difficult

We want to extend a thank you to everyone who attended the session on the 11th January and contributed thoughts and opinions — we found it to be an invaluable experience and can’t wait to learn more.

Tender now live

Having gone away and reconsidered where we can add the most value, our tender is now live!

You can access the Invitation to Tender (ITT) at the following link: LINK

Please reach out to ftlenquiries@imcworldwide.com for any enquiries.

Closing date: Monday 21st February 2022 at 17:00 GMT.