As Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) makes efforts to achieve its development goals as per the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the region faces the difficulty of reaching these ambitions while maintaining the global requirement of net zero emissions. Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) is an innovative solution that can lead to potential job opportunities and help achieve the net zero goal. The carbon removal approaches can generate carbon removal credits, which can be traded internationally and are not typical carbon offsets, as CDR credits tend to have high durability and additionality.

Given the nascent nature of the CDR ecosystem in SSA, our project aims to accelerate SSA’s CDR startup ecosystem in three steps by, first, identifying CDR technologies and parts of the value chain with the highest potential for domestic socio-economic benefits, and second, assessing the readiness across three archetypical SSA countries to understand the broad potential across the region, and third, run a 6-months, structured CDR startup accelerator (in two separate batches) dedicated to the key technologies and bottlenecks identified