What I Learned Visiting Climate Tech Founders on the Ground in Nairobi.

Published: 2024  |  Perspective updated: 2025

For years I worked in sustainability within financial services. My team and I thought a lot about how to bring to life the power and potential impact of the assets we managed on behalf of customers — how to translate the abstract idea of “your money is invested in things that affect the world” into something people could actually connect with.

I always felt a certain distance from the reality of what that meant in practice. That changed when I took part in the Climate Ecosystem Tour in Nairobi, visiting companies at various stages of growth and hearing directly from founders about what they were building, what was hard, and where they were going.

It is one thing to read about climate tech and impact investing on a slide deck. It is another to sit in a room with someone who is doing it — who has built a business from the ground up, in a context with limited infrastructure and constrained capital, to solve a problem that the market was not solving.

Why Kenya

Kenya has become one of Africa's most compelling climate investment destinations. With a grid that is already 90% powered by clean energy, a government committed to 100% renewable generation by 2030, and a growing ecosystem of climate tech startups, it offers something rare: a context where the conditions for impact are genuinely aligned.

Carbon markets in Kenya have been developing rapidly, with voluntary carbon credits used to finance nature-based projects in grassland management and forest regeneration, as well as community-based cookstove programmes. For businesses, carbon credits are becoming a financing mechanism that does not require collateral — an important alternative in a market where traditional bank credit is scarce and expensive. The infrastructure for this is still being built, but the direction is clear.

Four companies worth knowing

Keep IT Cool is connecting small-scale farmers and fishermen to consumers through a smart distribution platform, leveraging cold storage and technology to reduce post-harvest losses in the fish and chicken value chains. In a context where a significant proportion of agricultural produce is lost before it reaches market, this is both an economic and an environmental intervention.

Verst Carbon is driving Africa's participation in voluntary carbon markets by unlocking climate finance and creating green jobs. The business works across project development, advisory services, capacity building, and innovation — building the infrastructure for African businesses to monetise their climate contributions.

M-KOPA finances smartphones and electric motorcycles for people who cannot access traditional credit, using a daily micro-instalment model that builds credit history and unlocks access to loans, insurance, and data. The company has already avoided 2.03 million tonnes of CO₂e since 2010 through solar products and circular economy initiatives, and its electric motorcycle financing is reducing harmful pollutants by over 90% compared to petrol alternatives. Riders save an average of KES 730 per day through reduced fuel and maintenance costs, with 66% reporting higher earnings since switching. Financial inclusion meeting climate action — in one product.

Roam is building a low-cost, sustainable transport ecosystem through electric motorcycles, buses, and charging solutions designed specifically for African mobility needs. Made in Kenya, for Africa — a positioning that reflects both commercial logic and a genuine commitment to solving the right problem in the right context.

What I took away

The thing that struck me most about every founder I met was the specificity of their understanding. They were not applying general solutions to African markets. They were building from the constraint — from the infrastructure gaps, the credit barriers, the supply chain failures, the particular ways that climate change is already affecting the people they serve.

That specificity is what makes the difference between impact investing that works and impact investing that looks good in a report. Capital deployed with genuine understanding of context produces different outcomes than capital deployed from a distance.

I came back thinking about how much financial services organisations — including those managing the assets of millions of customers in the UK — are still figuring out how to make the connection between investment decisions and real-world impact legible to the people whose money they are managing. The founders I met in Nairobi are part of what that money could be doing. Making that connection visible feels like one of the most important things financial services can work on.