Nairobi will host the first-ever Africa Carbon Removal Summit on April 14–15, 2026. It’s a milestone for a continent that has enormous CDR potential but has been largely left out of the conversation.

Mapping CDR in Sub-Saharan Africa

Strathmore University’s Agri-Food Innovation Centre (SAFIC) has been running a research program to map the CDR landscape across sub-Saharan Africa. Their stakeholder engagement sessions — the latest held on March 4 in Nairobi — are surfacing critical findings about the state of the field.

The headline number: around 80% of CDR startups in Africa report difficulty accessing venture capital or dilutive funding. Regulatory uncertainty compounds the problem. There’s no shortage of potential — Africa has vast arable land suitable for enhanced weathering, biomass resources for biochar, and coastal areas for ocean-based approaches. What’s missing is the financial and institutional infrastructure.

Why Nairobi, Why Now

The summit will bring together researchers, innovators, policymakers, and investors. The timing is deliberate — it follows Kenya’s recent crackdown on low-quality carbon credit projects and the launch of the country’s National Carbon Registry.

Kenya is positioning itself as the regulatory leader for carbon markets in East Africa. That combination of tightening standards and building new institutions makes it a natural host for a summit focused on high-integrity carbon removal.

The CDI Connection

CDI has two portfolio companies operating in Africa — ZEN Carbon and Flux — both working on biochar-based carbon removal. Africa isn’t a future market for CDR. It’s an active one, with real projects delivering real tonnes.

But scaling requires exactly what this summit aims to build: connections between the people doing the science, the people writing the policy, and the people with the capital. The fact that this is happening in Nairobi — not London or San Francisco — matters.

What to Watch

If Africa’s CDR ecosystem follows the same trajectory as its mobile banking revolution (M-Pesa launched in Kenya), expect leapfrogging: skipping the slow, centralized infrastructure-building phase and going straight to distributed, technology-enabled approaches. Biochar, enhanced weathering on smallholder farms, and distributed monitoring are natural fits.

The Africa Carbon Removal Summit is on April 14–15, 2026, in Nairobi.

Source: Strathmore SAFIC

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