The Stay / LATEK Alliance works with a network of over 50 social enterprises and community organisations across Uganda, building an organic cereal and agroforestry programme with smallholder farmers at its centre. The question they brought to me was one many organisations in this space now face: can carbon finance help pay for this — and if so, how?

That question is easy to answer badly. Carbon markets attract optimistic modelling, and smallholder programmes are particularly exposed to it: certification overhead, twenty-year permanence commitments and dMRV costs that only work above a certain scale. The risk is not a failed project. It is a programme that quietly reorganises itself around a revenue stream that never arrives.

My work has been to build the decision architecture that prevents that. I separated two questions that are routinely collapsed into one — whether agroforestry and biochar make sense as interventions, and whether carbon co-financing makes sense on top of them — and co-designed, together with the Ugandan team, a rapid feasibility scan built around explicit kill criteria rather than exhaustive research. Biochar is assessed as a soil intervention first, with carbon treated strictly as an upside layer. Agroforestry is assessed against the realistic alternative: partnering with established operators rather than building in-house.

Alongside this I have supported partner due diligence, structured peer learning with established Ugandan carbon programmes, and consortium and grant work — keeping desk analysis ahead of field spend wherever the answer can be found without a vehicle.

The deliverable is not a business case. It is a defensible go, redesign or stop — reached quickly, with the reasoning legible to management and to funders.