In January 2026, one of Africa’s most ambitious clean cooking companies shut down operations. KOKO Networks had raised over $100 million and was backed by a $180 million World Bank guarantee designed to shield investors from losses caused by government actions. It had reached more than 1.5 million households across Kenya with a clean cooking business built to displace charcoal.
KOKO had built the business. What it could not secure was the Kenyan government’s approval to sell the carbon credits its business model depended on. The Letter of Authorisation that Article 6 of the Paris Agreement requires never arrived, and the revenue that would have funded KOKO’s subsidies disappeared with it.
A carbon credit is, in plain terms, a tradeable certificate. Each one certifies that somewhere in Africa, a tonne of carbon dioxide (CO₂) that would have entered the atmosphere did not, because a forest was protected, a cleaner stove replaced a dirtier one, or a solar plant displaced a diesel generator.
Governments and companies buy them to offset emissions they cannot yet eliminate, either to meet regulatory obligations or to satisfy net-zero commitments made to investors and customers. A credit’s price and legitimacy depend on whether the reduction is real, additional, permanent, and, critically, counted only once. That last requirement is why national registries exist.
On August 11, 2026, the Government of Zambia launched a fully operational national carbon registry, becoming the second African country after Ghana to combine live registry infrastructure with a signed bilateral agreement and a completed transaction. That combination now exists in two African markets.
What a registry actually does, and why it matters
To understand why Zambia’s launch is consequential, it helps to understand what a national registry actually does. Article 6 of the Paris Agreement allows countries to trade emissions reductions internationally, but only if those reductions are formally authorised, tracked, and adjusted in the host country’s national accounting so they cannot be counted twice.
A national registry is the digital infrastructure that makes all of this possible. Without one, a project developer can generate perfectly legitimate carbon credits and still be unable to sell them, because there is no institutional mechanism to authorise the transaction. That is precisely the gap KOKO fell through, and it is precisely the gap Zambia has just closed.