Kenya’s new national carbon registry is expected to bring greater transparency to the country’s fast-growing carbon trading market and enforce rules that require projects to share their profits with host communities. However, six months after its launch, the public registry has yet to list any authorized projects or verified emission reductions, despite 80 project applications having been submitted.
That delay matters for more than simply those developers awaiting permits. The Kenya National Carbon Registry (KNCR) requires projects on public land to allocate 40% of the resulting profits to host communities, while non-land-based projects must allocate 25%. Carbon projects on private land are exempt from such contributions. Until projects begin moving through the registry, there is no way of knowing whether those percentages will translate into predictable, transparent payments.
For Kenya, the registry is therefore undergoing two tests at the same time: whether it can provide a predictable route for projects to enter the market, and whether its benefit-sharing rules can transform a legal requirement into money that communities can verify and rely on.
Kenya has changed the rules
Operating under the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA), the KNCR is the country’s first sovereign carbon registry platform for registering, authorizing, and monitoring carbon projects. The registry is intended to provide greater assurance to governments and international buyers that emission reductions are real and have not been double-counted.
The new platform is also designed to implement Kenya’s 2024 Climate Change (Carbon Markets) Regulations, which established regulations for the country’s carbon market and introduced mandatory benefit sharing with communities hosting carbon projects.
Before the 2024 regulations came into force, there was no national standard governing how much revenue communities should receive. Agreements for land-based projects were negotiated individually between developers and communities, while many non-land-based projects reinvested carbon revenues through initiatives such as cleaner cookstoves rather than direct profit sharing.
Although data for 2024 and 2025 was not amalgamated, pastoralist conservancies in northern Kenya’s Isiolo, Marsabit, Samburu and Laikipia counties received about US$5 million through the Northern Kenya Rangelands Carbon Project alone. The question is therefore no longer whether carbon projects can generate money for communities. It is whether Kenya’s new system can make those benefits predictable, transparent and enforceable.
Can the registry move projects through the system?
As of July 31, 2026, NEMA had received around 80 project applications, but as yet none of these are being shown as authorized on the public database. The authority has described the current period as a transition from system development to full-scale operationalization, suggesting that applications are under review rather than being rejected.
In an interview with DevelopmentAid, carbon markets expert Roy Keagan that the process has taken considerably longer than many market participants had expected, adding that “the future credibility of this market depends on it”.
Keagan argued that developers need to know where their projects stand within the process and what they need to do to move their application forward. “Projects can’t deliver jobs, employment, economic opportunities and incentives before a permit is issued.”
The consequences could extend beyond just delays for developers. The liquidation of the clean-cooking startup company, KOKO Networks, in January 2026, which put 700 workers out of work and affected access to clean cooking fuel for 1.3 million Kenyan households, showed how carbon-credit authorization can become a business-critical issue. A dispute with the government over authorization prevented KOKO from selling carbon credits, highlighting how uncertainty in the approval process can adversely impact both the businesses and the communities depending on them.
KOKO is an extreme example, but it illustrates the system in place should be able to be navigated predictably by developers and investors. For KNCR, the challenge is therefore not simply to process applications more quickly. It is to establish a process that is sufficiently predictable while maintaining the scrutiny required to ensure the integrity of the market.
The percentages allocated to communities may not tell the whole story
The 25% and 40% benefit-sharing requirements look impressive on paper. Nevertheless, experts warn that percentages alone do not indicate just how much money communities will ultimately receive or when they will receive it.
The regulations specify that any costs incurred by communities in providing services to a project are treated as operating or business expenses by the entity responsible for the project. The 25% or 40% social contribution is calculated from the entity’s net profit after these costs and any other operating costs have been deducted.
This creates a potential weakness in the benefit-sharing formula. If legitimate project expenses and wages directly reduce the profit base from which the community benefit is calculated, a project could technically comply with the regulations, whereas the economic value reaching the community might be considerably lower than a simple reading of the 25% and 40% figures might suggest. Since Kenya’s regulations do not restrict how these operational costs impact the final calculation, the first transactions through KNCR will reveal whether these rules can truly be made measurable and verifiable.
Why Kenya’s experiment matters beyond its borders
Kenya’s carbon registry could become more than a national system. The infrastructure developed for KNCR is already being adapted for use elsewhere in Africa.
GIZ, working with its Kenyan partner Verst Carbon, built the KNCR and is now adapting that same infrastructure into the Africa Registry for Carbon (ARC), a free, license-free platform being rolled out initially in East Africa. GIZ is also developing ARC Studio, an AI-assisted tool designed to allow countries to create customized national carbon registries within minutes, provided the relevant laws and institutional processes are already in place.
That last proviso is vital. A registry can provide the digital infrastructure for registration and monitoring, but effective carbon markets also depend on regulatory frameworks, institutional capacity, authorization procedures and safeguards for communities. If digital infrastructure scales more quickly than the institutions responsible for governing it, countries could replicate the infrastructure but fail to resolve accountability issues.
Kenya is therefore an early test. If KNCR can demonstrate predictable project approvals and transparent, verifiable community payments, it could provide a useful template for other countries. If gaps remain, those weaknesses could travel with the technology.
Kenya’s approach is not the only model available in the region. Rwanda has a largely similar carbon market framework, but demands a 30% minimum for land-based projects, and separate fees for various administrative costs. Ghana, by contrast, does not have a fixed percentage for carbon revenues but rather a set of cost-reimbursement guidelines for individual projects. Therefore, so far, there is no single template being used in Africa for community benefit sharing.
What stakeholders should expect
Nairobi-based lawyers Haanee Khan and Nkatha Omondi of Spencer West comment that the new framework is likely to bring “increased compliance costs”, greater transparency requirements, and regulatory monitoring. Companies planning to launch carbon projects should begin to treat standardized, transparent reporting on community revenues as a compliance factor now rather than after a possible regulatory crackdown.
For investors and project developers, the immediate risk is not only regulatory but also reputational. As Kenya’s carbon market framework is positioned as a model for other countries, scrutiny will increase over whether the 25% or 40% community-benefit requirements translate into money actually reaching communities. Developers with significant REDD+ or other land-based carbon assets should take particular note, as the 40% requirement creates a substantially greater exposure than the 25% for non-land-based projects.
For NGOs, community organizations and investigative reporters, the registry could become an accountability tool rather than a simple database. Its project information and reporting should be matched against project-level disclosures and communities’ own experience to determine whether the reported benefits are reaching the intended recipients. Khan and Omondi note that the new framework also gives governments and community stakeholders a more formal role in carbon governance, strengthening the ability of communities to understand their rights and negotiate with developers.
For lenders and financiers, Khan and Omondi note that registration and verification status will form part of project due diligence and credit-risk analysis for any bank or investor assessing the feasibility of carbon projects. Until the KNCR demonstrates that it can process projects reliably, uncertainty over authorization could make carbon projects harder to finance.
The real test is still ahead
Six months after its launch, Kenya’s carbon registry has demonstrated neither failure nor success on its most important promise. No projects have as yet moved far enough through the system for the public to assess how the new rules will work in practice.
The real test, however, will not be the number of projects that appear in the registry, but whether the first projects make it possible to trace a carbon credit from authorization to profit, and from profit to the community entitled to receive a share of it.