SCGV’s Kayne Harwood and Gray Maguire with community leaders, government officials and NGO partners during a three-day co-design workshop in Nandi, Kenya

Our global development efforts and the fight against climate change have suffered a myriad of blows recently, so it is wonderful to have some good news.

I recently returned from Nandi County in western Kenya. Nandi is a very green place, with a mild climate. Great for farming. I was surprised to find that child nutrition in the region lags behind the national average.

The Commissioner in charge of the Department of Agriculture told me a story to explain this –

At one time, small lot farmers only a few acres in size grew multiple crops and raised livestock. But tea estates paid large bonuses to farmers for converting their farms to tea – gone were the chickens, the cows and the kitchen gardens.

While tea prices were high, household incomes rose but they were less self-sufficient and now had to pay for meat and vegetables for nutritious meals. The male head of household made the financial decisions, and might prioritise other things over paying for food.

Now circumstances are getting tough for tea farmers in Nandi. Climate change is exposing them to more frost and hail events, longer gaps between the rains and more pests and disease. The prices they get for tea are also falling.

Now that many smallholder farmers in Nandi no longer have the means of subsistence to fall back on, they find it hard to raise the cash they need to nourish their families. All of this is having a profound adverse effect on child nutrition and health.

But a groundbreaking collaboration has unlocked an unlikely new source of funding to support smallholder farming families’ livelihoods and climate resilience – City law firms carbon offsetting budgets! Eight of the UK’s leading law firms (through Legal Charter 1.5) are providing USD $5 million over 10 years to fund a program to change lives and restore the environment in Nandi.

Kayne with project partners in Nandi

The collaboration between Save the Children Global Ventures (SCGV), a charitable foundation focused on finance and technology innovation to transform children’s lives, and the law firms will see the climate impacts of the program measured and verified, to generate carbon credits for the law firms. This is the first time Save the Children has used carbon markets to invest in child-focused climate adaptation in vulnerable communities over a long horizon and the potential to scale this approach is significant!

The benefits of the project are far reaching. It will support 10,000 small farms (roughly 50,000 people, mostly women and children) to better protect tea crops through boundary planting and inter-planting, diversify farming income by growing avocados and tree tomatoes, restore over-farmed riverbeds and wetland edges and increase  the tree cover in Nandi to reverse changes in the local micro-climate and deterioration of the Lower Mau water basin. Promotion of nutrition, child rights and gender equity will support the translation of these benefits into enhanced nutrition and income stability for local children and families.

It is a project that the local community has not only embraced but is leading. I was there to attend a three-day community co-design workshop and undertake visits to farms, nurseries and aggregation centres for the project. We had fantastic engagement from over 60 attendees including county government leaders, community leaders and local NGOs, involving many women, youth and people with disabilities.

Of course, we need much more private sector finance like this – currently the private sector only contributes USD $35B a year towards the required $550B per year needed for nature-based climate solutions – solutions that use natural interventions, like tree planting, to achieve social and environmental objectives.

As well as more funding, we need the funding to go to high-quality projects that benefit communities and children. A 2023 report from Save the Children found that only 2.4% of climate finance from key multilaterals supported child-responsive activities (Falling Short: Addressing the climate finance gap for children)

Climate change is having an adverse impact on children in Save the Children’s core mission areas of education, health and nutrition and child protection. One billion children live in countries at extreme risk.

The project in Nandi is just a start, the partnership has been carefully designed to allow new collaborators to join. For many law firms, finding carbon credits that both meet rigorous standards and reflect their commitment to social and environmental responsibility can be a challenge. This collaboration allows firms to pool their resources and directly support projects that deliver measurable benefits for children, communities and the climate – ensuring their climate investments have real, lasting impact.

The founding law firms include: Freshfields, Clyde & Co, Slaughter and May, DLA Piper, Taylor Wessing, Charles Russell Speechlys and Simmons & Simmons. In addition to the high-impact outcomes for children and their community, the firms receive a stream of high integrity carbon removal credits (verified and aligned to ICVCM’s approved standards and Core Carbon Principles).

Law firms are increasingly expected to demonstrate leadership on climate issues, both in their operations and in the advice they give clients. This partnership not only helps them secure high-integrity carbon credits, but also sets a replicable model for how the legal sector, and other professional services sectors, can drive positive change by supporting projects that deliver both environmental and social benefits.

By committing to a ten-year funding window, the law firms allow Save the Children to plan a decade ahead, while establishing an ongoing revenue source to support children over the carbon projects’ 30+ year lifetimes.

Given the early success of this project we hope there will be many more such projects to come.

Kayne Harwood is SCGV’s Executive Director of Climate Finance. Have questions or want to collaborate? Find him on LinkedIn or email kharwood@scgv.org.