In 2021, Ghana became one of the first countries in sub-Saharan Africa to sign a bilateral Article 6.2 carbon credit agreement under the Paris Agreement. The counterparty was Switzerland, acting through the KliK Foundation — the Swiss private-sector vehicle created to help Swiss companies meet domestic carbon obligations by purchasing emission reductions abroad. The project covered cookstove improvements in Ghanaian households, the kind of intervention that reduces indoor air pollution, cuts deforestation, and produces measurable reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.
The price Switzerland’s buyers paid for each tonne of CO2-equivalent credit has not been officially published. But disclosure from the KliK Foundation’s portfolio documentation and third-party analysis from Carbon Market Watch puts the range for African bilateral ITMO transactions at between $10 and $40 per tonne — with the lower end applying to most cookstove and clean cooking projects. For comparison, a carbon credit on the European Union Emission Trading System was trading above €60 per tonne in the same period. The compliance-grade voluntary carbon market — the Gold Standard tier that ITMOs are theoretically meant to replace — was pricing cookstove credits at $5 to $15 per tonne before the market correction of 2023.
The price question matters, but it is not the most important question Africa’s negotiators are failing to answer. The most important question is: what does selling that credit cost the country that sold it?
What Article 6.2 Actually Transfers
Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement allows countries to trade Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes — ITMOs — between governments. When Ghana sells an ITMO to Switzerland, Switzerland can count that tonne against its own Nationally Determined Contribution, the binding climate pledge each Paris Agreement signatory submits to the UNFCCC. This is called the “corresponding adjustment”: the tonne leaves Ghana’s NDC accounting ledger and enters Switzerland’s.
The language is technical, but the economics are straightforward. Every country that has signed the Paris Agreement has a fixed carbon budget — an amount of emissions it can produce while meeting its climate pledge, and a set of emission reductions it must achieve. When Ghana sells ITMOs to Switzerland, Ghana’s domestic carbon budget shrinks. If Ghana wants to remain on track to meet its NDC after selling credits, it must either reduce its own emissions faster than its pledge requires, or count fewer future reductions in its climate accounting. It is the equivalent of a country selling a portion of its climate target.
“This is not the voluntary market,” says a senior climate negotiator from an East African government who has been involved in bilateral Article 6.2 discussions and asked not to be named because the talks are ongoing. “In the voluntary market, the credit was additional to a country’s target — it was extra. Under Article 6.2, you are selling part of your national commitment. Every tonne sold is a tonne you have to make up somewhere else, or a tonne you no longer have to trade in the future when the price is higher.”
The Map: Twelve Countries, Three Buyers
The most active bilateral buyers are Switzerland, Japan and Singapore. Their motivations differ: Switzerland is meeting domestic carbon pricing obligations through the KliK Foundation; Japan is using its Joint Crediting Mechanism (JCM) as a foreign policy and investment vehicle, pairing ITMO purchases with Japanese technology exports; Singapore has signed framework agreements intended to meet its own net-zero commitments and provide carbon credits to Singapore-regulated companies.
The African country list that has signed or is in advanced bilateral negotiation includes: Ghana (Switzerland since 2021, Singapore MOU 2023), Kenya (Japan JCM, Switzerland FOEN discussions), Malawi (Switzerland, KliK Foundation), Senegal (Japan JCM, solar irrigation sector), Morocco (Japan JCM, energy efficiency and renewables), Rwanda (Switzerland, KliK), Tanzania (bilateral discussions with Japan and Switzerland ongoing), Zambia (bilateral discussions with Switzerland), Cote d’Ivoire (Japan JCM early-stage), Mozambique (Switzerland, linked to cookstove and land use), Ethiopia (Japan JCM, clean cooking and mini-grid), and Togo (Switzerland, clean cooking and agriculture).
The sectors covered are dominated by clean cooking (improved cookstoves, biogas digesters, LPG distribution), solar mini-grids, and land use/forestry. These are the sectors where emission reductions are most measurable, most bankable, and — not coincidentally — already funded by development finance institutions for reasons that have nothing to do with carbon credit revenue.
Japan’s JCM programme publishes its African project registry. As of early 2026, JCM-registered projects in Africa span improved cookstoves in Ethiopia, solar-powered irrigation in Senegal, geothermal efficiency improvements in Kenya, and energy efficiency in Moroccan industry. Japan provides grant financing to the projects in exchange for receiving a share of the ITMOs generated, typically 50 percent, with the host government retaining the other 50 percent for its own NDC credit.
The Price Africa Is Not Receiving
Carbon market pricing is complicated by the existence of multiple markets operating simultaneously. The KliK Foundation’s Swiss bilateral pricing — the most publicly documented — sits in the $10-$40 per tonne range for African projects, with prices varying by project type, vintage year, and contract term. Japan’s JCM pricing is generally lower, with the grant-for-ITMO structure meaning the “price” of the carbon credit is embedded in the grant value rather than paid per tonne directly.
What Africa is not receiving is the price at which those same tonnes will likely trade in the post-2025 Article 6.4 compliance market — the UNFCCC-supervised centralized carbon market that the Baku rulebook has put on a path toward full operationalization. Estimates from the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) project Article 6.4 credits could trade at $50 to $150 per tonne once the market is operational and demand is drawn from countries with hard-to-abate sectors needing to offset residual emissions. The World Bank’s State and Trends of Carbon Pricing report has highlighted the same pricing trajectory.
African countries signing today’s bilateral deals are, in effect, pre-selling their cheapest and most accessible carbon reductions at current prices, leaving the more expensive and less accessible reductions — industrial emissions, transport, deforestation at scale — as what remains in their NDC budget. If the compliance price rises as projected, those residual credits will be worth more. But by then, Africa will have fewer of them to sell.
The Capacity Gap Behind Every Signed Agreement
The KliK Foundation is a professionally staffed institution with decades of experience in carbon market negotiations. Japan’s JCM secretariat within the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and the Ministry of the Environment (MOEJ) deploys specialist negotiators with specific mandates and defined pricing floors. Switzerland’s Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN), which leads bilateral ITMO negotiations on the government side, has been building expertise in Article 6 implementation since 2017.
The counterpart in most African bilateral negotiations is a climate ministry or environment agency that may have one or two technical officers assigned to Article 6 implementation alongside a full domestic policy workload. “The Swiss and Japanese teams know exactly what they want to buy, at what price, and on what terms,” says a person with direct knowledge of bilateral negotiations in East Africa. “Our teams are learning the framework at the same time they are signing the contracts.”
The NDC Partnership, which provides technical support to developing countries on climate commitments, has flagged this negotiating capacity gap in internal assessments seen by BETAR. The African Climate Policy Centre (ACPC) in Nairobi has published analysis noting that several African countries have signed Article 6.2 host country agreements without completing the domestic authorisation process required under Article 6 rules — meaning the corresponding adjustments may not be legally valid, creating future accounting uncertainty.
Civil society has gone further. Carbon Market Watch has noted that ITMO agreements in several African countries were negotiated and signed by climate or environment ministries without finance ministry involvement — creating parallel carbon revenue streams that are not incorporated into national budget planning. Parliamentary oversight has been limited: in Kenya, civil society groups flagged in 2024 that the Article 6.2 framework agreement with Switzerland had not been subject to legislative review.
COP30 and What Belém Will Ask
The Belém climate summit in November 2026 will be the first COP conducted under the full Baku rulebook for Article 6.2 bilateral deals. Parties are expected to submit their first corresponding adjustment reports — showing how many ITMOs have been transferred and how they affect each country’s NDC accounting. For Africa’s bilateral sellers, this will be the moment when the accounting cost becomes visible not just to climate ministries but to finance ministries, parliaments, and development partners who set conditionality around NDC implementation.
The IMF and World Bank have both begun incorporating NDC alignment into country financing assessments. Multilateral development banks including the African Development Bank have aligned their new project approval criteria with NDC targets. If a country’s NDC carbon budget has been partially sold through ITMO deals, its remaining headroom for internationally-financed climate investment shrinks proportionately.
There is also a scenario that is not being discussed publicly. Article 6.4 — the UNFCCC-supervised centralized mechanism — is expected to become operational with full fungibility in the 2026-2028 period. When it does, the bilateral ITMO deals struck between 2021 and 2026 will be competing against a more liquid, more transparent, and likely higher-priced market. Countries that have sold their easiest credits cheaply will be asking a harder question: what is left to trade, and at what price was the early inventory worth?
What Fair Value Looks Like
Africa contributes approximately 3.8 percent of current global greenhouse gas emissions while containing some of the world’s largest remaining carbon sinks — tropical forests, wetlands, and savanna grasslands with significant sequestration potential. The continent is simultaneously the region most exposed to climate impact and the region receiving the lowest climate finance per unit of vulnerability. This combination should, in theory, give African carbon assets a strategic premium.
The conditions for achieving that premium exist on paper. Article 6.2 allows countries to set minimum prices, demand transparency clauses, and require that a share of ITMO proceeds fund domestic adaptation — the Share of Proceeds mechanism. Rwanda has incorporated a minimum price floor and a domestic adaptation levy in its bilateral agreements. Ghana’s updated Article 6 regulations published in 2024 require parliamentary ratification for host country agreements.
The challenge is that these stronger governance models take longer to implement and require more negotiating capacity than most African governments currently have. In the race to sign bilateral agreements ahead of COP30, the faster path is the less protected one.
What Africa is selling in these bilateral deals is not just carbon credits. It is the accounting headroom to develop, and the policy space to claim climate progress. At $10 to $40 per tonne, it is underpricing both.
