Laying the foundations for a digital Measurement, Reporting, and Verification (dMRV) platform

African Bamboo is developing one of Ethiopia’s most ambitious long-term restoration programmes: a 40-year afforestation and bamboo-based agroforestry project that will ultimately expand to more than 19,000 hectares across Sidama and Oromia. The goal is to restore degraded highland ecosystems, regenerate native bamboo and tree cover, and strengthen community livelihoods through diversified income and future carbon revenues.

For the coming year, African Bamboo aims to map and validate 1,500 hectares—the essential first step before planting and before carbon benefits can be realised. Akvo is supporting this phase by helping establish the digital foundations needed for a scalable, verification-ready MRV system.


Partners

African Bamboo


Sector

Climate


Services

Platform development


Location

Oromia and Sidama regions, Ethiopia

The challenge

From our initial deep-dive into African Bamboo’s field processes, data flows, and 2026 planting targets, it became clear that the next phase of growth requires tighter coordination between farmer onboarding, documentation, and mapping. Validating 1,500 hectares across Sidama and Oromia demands high-quality plot data at the moment of capture, reliable consent and title-deed linkage, and smooth workflows in fully offline environments where connectivity is limited. Ensuring accurate polygons, reducing rework, and giving supervisors timely feedback all become increasingly important at scale. To meet these goals—and to prepare for carbon verification, benefit-sharing, and future financial integration—African Bamboo needs more connected, automated, and feedback-driven data operations.

 

The solution

Akvo and African Bamboo are implementing a six-month pilot focused on improving operational efficiency and building the groundwork for a scalable digital MRV system. Kobo tools are being redesigned with stronger logic, accurate geotrace, and mandatory farmer consent and deed capture. To address offline realities, Akvo is introducing hybrid validation loops: on-device checks through a custom app or Kobo add-on, and nightly cloud-based validations that generate QA sheets and lightweight dashboards. Field teams receive multilingual Trainer-of-Trainers sessions to boost productivity toward 6+ farms/day. In parallel, an OCR pilot supports title-deed verification, and a unified backend links all farmer, plot, consent, and deed records—enabling African Bamboo to confidently map and validate 1,500 hectares next year.

The impact

African Bamboo's strengthened data system supports its restoration and carbon programme with more accurate, efficient, and future-proof data operations. With improvements in field data operations, including offline data capture, polygon accuracy, automated and secured linking of farmer and pilot records, and more, enumerator productivity is projected to more than double. 

With a unified backend in place, African Bamboo will have a single, traceable source of truth to support the 1500-hectare mapping target and the transition to planting. This is the foundation for turning bamboo and trees into verified carbon assets, shared fairly with farmers and usable for future financial services such as green loans. These improvements accelerate African Bamboo’s ability to scale toward its full 19,000-hectare vision.