How ClimateWells Is Using OCP to Finance Groundwater Restoration

In the semi-arid regions of sub-Saharan Africa, access to clean groundwater is not simply a matter of convenience — it is the difference between a community that thrives and one that struggles to survive. Women and children walk hours each day to reach unreliable water sources. Diesel-powered pumps, where they exist, drain household incomes and pump carbon into an already warming atmosphere. And as the climate shifts, the rains that once recharged aquifers arrive later, leave earlier, and fall harder when they do come.

ClimateWells was founded on the conviction that this problem — the water-energy-climate nexus — could be solved together, not separately. By drilling and maintaining solar-powered boreholes in rural communities, and financing that work through verified carbon credits, ClimateWells has built a model that delivers clean water, cuts emissions, and generates the revenue needed to sustain both.

The Water-Energy-Climate Problem

Across rural communities in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia, the traditional approach to water access has relied on hand-dug wells, seasonal rivers, and diesel-powered pumps — each carrying its own set of risks. Diesel pumps are expensive to run, prone to breakdown, and emit significant greenhouse gases. Hand-dug wells are vulnerable to contamination and drought. Seasonal sources disappear precisely when communities need them most.

ClimateWells' approach centres on deep borehole drilling paired with solar-powered pumping systems. Each installation is designed for a 20-year operational life, with a local maintenance programme that trains community technicians and funds ongoing upkeep. The carbon finance mechanism is what makes the economics work: by displacing diesel fuel and reducing the time women spend collecting water — time that would otherwise be spent burning biomass for cooking — each borehole generates measurable, verifiable emissions reductions that can be sold as carbon credits on voluntary markets.

The challenge, from the beginning, was credibility. Carbon markets have faced hard questions about the integrity of credits — whether the emissions reductions claimed are real, additional, and permanent. ClimateWells needed a registry platform that could help them answer those questions rigorously, transparently, and at a pace that matched the urgency of the communities they were serving.

Why ClimateWells Chose OCP

When ClimateWells began evaluating registry platforms in 2022, the team assessed several established options. What drew them to the Open Carbon Protocol was a combination of factors that, taken together, felt genuinely different.

Speed to methodology approval was the first. Traditional registry pathways can take 18 to 36 months to move a novel methodology from submission to approval. For ClimateWells, that timeline was prohibitive — communities were waiting, and the window for early-mover carbon credit revenue was critical to project financing. OCP's structured but agile review process offered a credible path to approval in a fraction of that time.

Collaborative expert review was the second. Rather than a black-box assessment by a single validation body, OCP convened a community of independent experts — hydrologists, carbon accounting specialists, development economists, and dMRV technologists — who engaged directly with the ClimateWells team throughout the review process. This wasn't just scrutiny; it was co-development. Reviewers flagged gaps, suggested improvements, and helped the team build a stronger methodology than they could have produced alone.

Transparency of the process was the third, and perhaps the most important for long-term credibility. Every stage of the methodology review — submissions, expert comments, revisions, and final decisions — is published on the OCP registry. For buyers of ClimateWells credits, that public record is a form of assurance that no other platform was offering at the same level of granularity.

Building the Methodology: An Iterative Journey

ClimateWells submitted their initial methodology draft to OCP in early 2023. The draft outlined a framework for quantifying emissions reductions from solar borehole installations, drawing on established baselines for diesel displacement and biomass avoidance. What followed was not a passive waiting period — it was an active, iterative dialogue.

The OCP expert community raised substantive questions in the first review round. How was the team accounting for variability in aquifer yield across different geological formations? What was the counterfactual scenario for communities that had no diesel pump to displace? How would monitoring data be collected and verified in areas with limited connectivity?

Each question pushed the ClimateWells team to sharpen their thinking. The geological variability question led to a stratified baseline approach, segmenting project sites by aquifer type and yield class. The counterfactual question prompted a more rigorous community survey methodology to establish pre-project water collection practices. And the monitoring question became the catalyst for ClimateWells' most significant technical innovation: the integration of digital measurement, reporting, and verification — dMRV — into every borehole installation.

Each borehole now carries a low-power IoT sensor suite that measures water flow rates, pump operating hours, and solar energy generation in real time. Data is transmitted via satellite uplink to a central monitoring platform, where it feeds directly into the carbon accounting model. The result is a continuous, tamper-evident record of actual water delivery — not a modelled estimate, but a measured reality. OCP's dMRV integration framework provided the technical standards and data schema that made this possible at scale.

After two rounds of revision and peer review, the ClimateWells Groundwater Restoration Methodology was formally approved by OCP in September 2023 — less than nine months from initial submission. It was a milestone that the team had not dared to plan for, but one that changed the trajectory of the organisation.

What ClimateWells Has Achieved

Since methodology approval, ClimateWells has moved quickly. As of mid-2025, the organisation has:

• 14 projects validated across Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia, spanning a range of geological and community contexts
• 38,400 carbon credits issued under the OCP registry, representing verified emissions reductions from diesel displacement and biomass avoidance
• 62 rural communities served, with an estimated 94,000 people now accessing clean water from ClimateWells-installed boreholes
• Over 2.1 million litres of clean water delivered per day, continuously monitored through the dMRV sensor network
• Zero borehole failures in the first 18 months of operation, attributed to the community technician training programme and real-time fault detection via the IoT monitoring system

The carbon credit revenue has been transformative. It has funded the drilling of boreholes that would otherwise have required grant financing — financing that is scarce, slow, and uncertain. By creating a self-sustaining revenue loop, ClimateWells has been able to plan a pipeline of projects two years in advance, something that was simply not possible before OCP registration.

In Their Own Words

"When we first approached OCP, we were a small team with a big idea and a methodology that had more gaps than we wanted to admit. What we found was not a gatekeeper — it was a partner. The expert community challenged us in ways that made our methodology genuinely stronger, and the transparency of the process meant that when we went to market with our credits, buyers could see exactly how we had arrived at our numbers. That trust is worth more than any certification stamp. We are now building the pipeline for our next 30 projects, and OCP is the foundation that makes that possible."

— Amara Diallo, Head of Methodology, ClimateWells

Looking Ahead

ClimateWells is not standing still. The organisation is currently developing a second-generation methodology that extends the framework to managed aquifer recharge — a technique that uses engineered infiltration structures to actively replenish groundwater reserves during wet seasons, building resilience against the increasingly erratic rainfall patterns that climate change is bringing to the region.

That methodology is already in the OCP review pipeline. The team expects to draw on the relationships and institutional knowledge built during the first methodology process — and to move even faster this time.

Beyond methodology development, ClimateWells is working with OCP to explore how the real-time dMRV data flowing from its borehole network could be made publicly accessible — a live, auditable record of water delivery and emissions reductions that any buyer, researcher, or community member could inspect. It is the kind of radical transparency that the carbon market has long promised and rarely delivered.

For the communities of sub-Saharan Africa who depend on clean groundwater, the stakes could not be higher. For ClimateWells and OCP, the work of proving that carbon finance can be both rigorous and rapid — both transparent and transformative — is only just beginning.