Financial Services as Infrastructure for Women’s Empowerment and Carbon Integrity

Contents

Executive Summary

Women do much of the operational work that carbon projects depend on: adopting clean technologies, managing resources, and sustaining the daily practices that reduce carbon emissions. Most carbon projects, however, concentrate asset ownership, revenue flows, and governance in the hands of others. This gap between who does the work and who holds the rights determines delivery, permanence, and reputational risk in the voluntary carbon market. Closing it is no longer only a question of equity. It is a question of whether carbon credits can meet the integrity standards that buyers and regulators increasingly apply.

This paper demonstrates that gender co-benefits — the measurable social and economic gains for women that result from their participation in carbon projects — should not be a secondary feature of carbon projects, but a material determinant of carbon credit integrity and that financial services are the infrastructure that makes those co-benefits both operational and verifiable.

The paper's central argument is that financial services ultimately shape who participates, who benefits, and what can be verified in carbon projects. Financial services design choices such as whose name appears on a loan, where a mobile money payment is routed, and what a repayment record demonstrates shape women's ability to participate on equitable terms, retain control over benefits, and produce verifiable evidence. When financial services are intentionally designed around women, they generate empowerment outcomes and also create the transaction data that carbon market standards, buyers, and regulators increasingly require to verify integrity claims. Thus, when gender co-benefits are grounded in financial architecture and measured proportionately, they greatly strengthen carbon market credibility.

Carbon market actors, who are the primary audience for this paper, are increasingly looking beyond technical carbon accounting to governance, benefit distribution, and risk management as indicators of integrity. Gender co-benefits are increasingly used to signal quality, yet inconsistent evidence and weak verification expose projects and buyers to credibility and reputational risk. This paper shows how gender-intentional financial design and proportionate measurement can reduce these risks while improving project performance.

For financial inclusion stakeholders, carbon markets represent a significant and growing channel through which low-income women can access productive assets, new income streams, and formal financial services. This paper demonstrates that financial inclusion is not merely a development add-on to carbon finance, but a core delivery mechanism that can shape empowerment outcomes, project integrity, and long-term sustainability.

Section 1 establishes why gender co-benefits matter for carbon integrity. It shows how women's roles in asset operation, resource management, and everyday stewardship directly affect delivery, permanence, governance, and reputational risk in carbon projects. This section introduces a practical framework mapping gender co-benefits to integrity risks and shows how financial services design choices can mitigate those risks.

Section 2 examines how financial services function as both empowerment enablers and integrity infrastructure, drawing on a SEWA/VNV solar water pump project in India as a case study. It shows how, in this project, gender-intentional financial design, particularly asset ownership, loan structure, and direct revenue distribution, changed women's economic agency and empowerment outcomes while improving project performance. This section also shows how independently verified empowerment outcomes (via the W+ Standard) translate such changes into credible, tradable evidence for the carbon market.

Section 3 explores the importance of adequately measuring and verifying gender co-benefits. It introduces a practical measurement continuum that aligns the rigor of evidence with the strength of each gender co-benefit claim. Two additional use cases — Carboneers from Ghana and CAVEX from Kenya and Tanzania — illustrate how everyday financial and digital records can substantiate participation and engagement claims at lower cost, while more intensive verification is reserved for outcome-level empowerment claims. This section closes by arguing that the binding constraint on gender co-benefit markets is demand coordination, not measurement feasibility.

Finally, Section 4 distills the implications of these learnings for market development. It sets out concrete recommendations for project developers, buyers, standards bodies, funders, and financial service providers on how to embed gender-intentional financial design into carbon projects, verify claims, and create incentives for more robust measurement.

For carbon market actors, the paper makes three concrete recommendations. First, apply gender-intentional design choices in project documentation with the same precision as carbon accounting assumptions: asset registration, payment routing, and benefit sharing mechanics should be disclosed at a level that allows buyers to assess delivery and permanence risk. Second, match the level of verification to the strength of the claim: participation claims can be credibly supported by transaction records, while empowerment claims require outcome-level measurement. And third, work the demand side of the market: a small number of coordinated anchor buyers can shift reference pricing for measured gender co-benefits faster than any supply-side intervention.

For financial inclusion actors, the evidence points to three parallel actions: treat carbon markets as a strategic inclusion frontier when designing financial products; view data generated from loans, payments, and repayment histories as core market infrastructure rather than incidental by-products; and engage with carbon standards and measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) institutions to shape proportionate, cost-effective verification approaches that reflect how projects function in practice.

1. Introduction

1.1 Why Gender Co-Benefits Matter for Carbon Integrity

In carbon projects across the developing world, women do much of the everyday work that reduces emissions: cooking with clean fuels, operating off-grid energy systems such as solar home systems and solar water pumps, cultivating crops under agroforestry, tending forests, and managing the household decisions that shape how natural resources are used.

This paper focuses on the voluntary carbon market, where buyers purchase credits on a discretionary basis and where the quality of a credit, including its empowerment claims, increasingly shapes its value. Yet women remain significantly underrepresented across this ecosystem. They are less likely to hold leadership roles or own project-related assets (ASEAN LCEP 2023a), and less likely to receive or influence carbon-related revenues (ASEAN LCEP 2023b). Insecure land rights, unpaid household labor, and discriminatory gender norms all limit their agency and exclude them from governance and benefit-sharing (Müller, Meza Murillo, and Weigelt 2024; Liswanti, Tamara, and Djoudi 2020).

Financial exclusion compounds these structural barriers. Globally, about 700 million women still do not have a financial account (Global Findex 2025), leaving them without the credit, savings, and secure payment channels that carbon projects increasingly rely on. Without access to credit, women struggle to acquire the productive assets such as clean cookstoves, solar home systems, and irrigation pumps, on which carbon projects depend, even where project subsidies or revenue-shares are available. Similarly, without savings or insurance, they cannot absorb shocks or invest in asset maintenance. And without secure payment channels, carbon revenues may bypass them entirely.

These risks persist throughout the carbon project lifecycle, yet current safeguards frameworks, which assess gender dimensions only at project entry and are oriented toward preventing harm rather than building women's agency, do not address them.

These exclusions have direct consequences for carbon project performance. When women do not own or control the equipment they operate, they are less incentivized to maintain it, increasing the risk of inconsistent use, breakdown, and abandonment.

When they are excluded from benefit-sharing and governance, projects face higher risks of elite capture, community contestation, and weak local legitimacy (ASEAN LCEP 2023a; Enable 2024), which expose buyers to reputational risk when delivery falls short of claims. The market is increasingly pricing these risks. Buyers are paying closer attention to how projects manage delivery, distribute benefits, and govern outcomes (Ecosystem Marketplace 2025), and the working definition of a "high-quality credit" has moved beyond technical carbon accounting to include governance, transparency, and credible verification (ICVCM 2023).

Where women's exclusion from participating in and benefiting from carbon projects creates project risk, and the market increasingly prices that risk, women's empowerment is not a peripheral co-benefit but a material integrity factor for carbon projects.

Gender co-benefits are increasingly part of this conversation, yet the market lacks consistent approaches to integrating gender into project design and to measuring the empowerment outcomes that result. Box 5 in the recommendations section examines why these approaches have been slow to emerge and their implications for future work.

Where women's exclusion from participating in and benefiting from carbon projects creates project risk, and the market increasingly prices that risk, women's empowerment is not a peripheral co-benefit but a material integrity factor for carbon projects, as outlined in Figure 1.

1.2 Financial Services as Empowerment Enabler and Integrity Infrastructure

If women's empowerment outcomes are a material factor in carbon project integrity, financial services are the mechanism through which carbon projects can reliably produce them. Financial services address the structural barriers identified in Figure 1 in three interconnected pathways (CGAP 2024b):

1. Rights and ownership pathways: when loans are structured with women as the named borrower and asset holder, they shift legal ownership, and the incentives for sustained use, to women.
2. Direct revenue distribution: when digital payment channels that women can access replace informal or intermediary-dependent arrangements, they ensure that carbon revenues reach women with traceable, auditable records.
3. Data infrastructure: these same financial systems generate the transaction records, repayment histories, and usage data that constitute operational evidence of inclusion and benefit distribution.

If women's empowerment outcomes are a material factor in carbon project integrity, financial services are the mechanism through which carbon projects can reliably produce them.

The most consequential of these is putting rights, assets, and revenues in women's own names. Evidence from land titling shows that when rights are registered individually rather than jointly or by household head, women's intra-household bargaining power, decision-making authority, and ability to access credit all strengthen (World Bank 2026; Strusi and Balestri 2025; UN Women and UNDP 2023). In carbon projects, this is what addresses delivery risk issues because women who hold the rights to project assets have both the authority and the incentive to sustain the project asset or activity over time.

What this looks like in practice varies by project type. In off-grid energy and clean cooking projects, women hold the loan and the asset title for the productive equipment, whereas in nature-based projects, where no physical asset changes hands, recognition takes the form of a producer contract or formal governance role. Where carbon revenues are routed directly to participants, women receive the payment into their own accounts. In each case, the underlying principle is the same, formal recognition in women's names.

Financial services that are designed around formal recognition in women's names do two things at once: they enable women's empowerment by giving them greater agency over the benefits that follow, and they produce the evidence, in the form of everyday financial transactions, that carbon markets need to verify it, such as who participated, what rights they held, how revenues flowed, and how the arrangements were sustained over time. In this way, they function as both empowerment enablers and integrity infrastructure.

Financial services designed around formal recognition in women's names do two things at once: they enable women's empowerment and they produce the evidence carbon markets need to verify it.

Table 1 maps each of these three financial services design elements to the empowerment pathway stage that they primarily support (access, sustained use, and agency) and to the integrity evidence that they produce for buyers and standards bodies.

TABLE 1. Financial Services Design, Empowerment Pathway, and Integrity Evidence

These three design elements only reduce the integrity risks mapped in Figure 1 if their outcomes can be credibly measured. The following pages outline how this measurement works, and Section 3 expands on this in more detail.

1.3 Measuring Gender Co-Benefits

Enabling women to participate in carbon projects is the first step. Verifying the empowerment outcomes that come from this participation is what makes gender co-benefits credible to the market. Robust measurement of gender co-benefits is critical, but current carbon standards often confirm only that women were consulted or counted, and not whether they gained meaningful agency, decision-making power, or economic benefit over time. Claims that cannot be verified are most exposed to the reputational and integrity risks now threatening the voluntary carbon market.

Enabling women to participate in carbon projects is the first step. Verifying the empowerment outcomes that come from this participation is what makes gender co-benefits credible to the market.

The idea that financial and operational data can provide credible evidence of women's empowerment outcomes is not new. Impact investors, development finance institutions, and sector bodies have for several years used transaction records, repayment histories, and customer-voice data from pay-as-you-go (PAYGo) solar and clean cooking companies to substantiate claims about women's income gains, time savings, improvements in safety, and changes in household decision-making (CGAP 2021; GOGLA 2025; 60 Decibels 2024; ENERGIA 2023). What is new is applying the same logic to the voluntary carbon market. Financial services already generate the records that constitute evidence. What the carbon market needs is a framework for matching the rigor of these records to the strength of the claims being made.

Gender-related claims in carbon projects exist along a continuum, from basic participation claims to broader claims about women's empowerment and agency. The rigor of evidence should be proportionate to the strength of the gender claim. Figure 2 shows three positions along this continuum and the form of evidence appropriate to each.

2. Financial Services as a Catalyst for Women's Empowerment in Carbon Markets

Section 1 set out the empowerment pathway through which gender-intentional financial services can move women from initial access to sustained use of productive assets, and from sustained use to agency over the benefits that follow. In this section, we will look at how this pathway can work in practice, drawing on data and testimonials from the Self Employed Women's Association's (SEWA) solar water pumps project with Value Network Ventures (VNV) and the carbon standard W+.

In 2024, CGAP partnered with SEWA's Grassroots Trading Network for Women to examine this pathway in practice. The Solar Water Pumps for Salt Farmers of the Little Rann of Kutch project, which has enabled 1,292 women salt farmers in Gujarat to replace diesel pumps with solar systems since 2017, offered a direct test of a critical question: what changes for women and what changes for the carbon project itself when financial services are designed to address women's barriers to asset ownership, participation, and income control?

To measure the changes rigorously, CGAP helped the project to obtain certification from the W+ Standard (Box 2), which documents whether and how financial design generates measurable gender co-benefits.

2.1 The SEWA Solar Water Pumps Carbon Project

In the Little Rann of Kutch in Gujarat, western India, more than 43,000 Agariya (salt farming) families produce a substantial share of India's salt. The landscape is extreme: more than 5,000 square kilometers of flat terrain that floods with seawater from June to September, then hardens into white salt flats where temperatures regularly exceed 45°C.

Each October, families leave their villages and migrate into the desert, living in makeshift shelters with limited access to clean water or basic services for the eight months of the salt season. In everyday production, Agariya men are involved in the strenuous tasks of salt farming, including digging salt wells, clearing mud, and operating diesel-powered water pumps to extract underground brine. They also participate in mediating relations with landowners and traders.

Women prepare the salt production units by forming mud-paste bunds that channel underground brine into shallow crystallization pans. They harden the pan bases through paglee, an ancient practice of stamping them with bare feet, often for over a month. They monitor diesel engines that run 12 to 24 hours a day throughout the season, while simultaneously managing all household responsibilities: cooking, collecting water and firewood, and caring for children in the desert. Yet despite contributing equal or greater physical labor, women's role in the production cycle has traditionally been classified as invisible, intensive, and unskilled (Patel 2025). This marginalization is compounded by the lack of formal land rights. The salt pans are located on state-owned land where workers lack formal ownership or lease documents (Bharwada & Mahajan, 2007). In the rare cases where tenancy exists, leases are held exclusively by men, leaving women without official land rights (India Development Review, 2025). In addition, payouts from salt traders or middlemen have traditionally been disbursed entirely to male heads of households (Bharwada & Mahajan, 2007).

This gendered division of labor mirrors patterns found across agricultural activities. Women participate in nearly every stage of production but are excluded from tasks that symbolize strength and authority such as operating the dantari, a wooden rake used for breaking salt crusts, reinforcing hierarchies that keep women's economic contribution subordinate and unacknowledged (Patel 2025).

Women perform the operational labor that drives mitigation outcomes, yet they often remain outside the formal benefit and ownership structures. This disconnect — between who does the work and who holds the rights — is the integrity gap that this analysis addresses.

2.1.1 The Diesel Debt Trap: A Barrier to Women's Participation and Carbon Project Permanence

Diesel dependency shapes every dimension of these women's economic lives. For generations, the one mechanized step in this artisanal process — pumping brine from underground wells — depended on diesel engines. Diesel consumed over 40 percent of a family's annual income, roughly INR 100,000 or approximately USD 1,200 per season (WOCAN 2025). To cover these fuel costs, along with food and drinking water for the eight-month salt season, Agariya households relied on a system of advance lending called dhiraan, in which salt traders provided seasonal credit and then bought the eventual harvest at prices the same traders set (Rehman 2023, Patel 2025).

Households therefore had a working financing relationship with the trader, but the relationship was structurally exploitative. The lender and the buyer were the same party, so the trader captured the surplus rather than the salt farmer. In addition, the named borrower was typically the male head of household even though women carried out the operational work of salt production. Salt farmers received roughly INR 0.30 (less than half a US cent) per kilogram for salt that later sold at INR 20 (approximately USD 0.24) on the market (Patel 2025), leaving most families with almost no profit at the end of the season and often in new debt that rolled into the next.

The health consequences of diesel dependency were equally severe, with 81 percent of women reporting chronic health problems including burns, respiratory disease, and skin infections from prolonged exposure to diesel fumes and chemical residue (WOCAN 2025). The nearby town of Kharaghoda is known locally as the "village of widows" because Agariya men die young from the cumulative toll of the work; when men die, their debts pass to their wives and children (Rehman 2023).

This context of structural debt, health risks, and asset exclusion was the starting point from which the project's financial design had to work.

2.1.2 The Financial Services Design That Enabled Women's Access to Solar Water Pumps

A phased set of financing mechanisms and partnerships was used to expand access to credit for the women salt farmers. In the initial pilot phase, the model centered on the International Finance Corporation (IFC) providing a loan to SEWA Bank, which then on lent to women farmers to purchase solar panels to replace their diesel-powered water pumps.

This early model was strengthened by a first loss guarantee funded by the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Program of YES Bank, a private sector bank. The guarantee covered 200 borrowers and reduced SEWA Bank's exposure to default risk, making the loans viable and affordable for women. The CSR funds also subsidized part of the 12 percent loan interest rate, lowering the effective rate to 7 percent, and financed basic capacity building to support loan uptake and repayment.

Strong repayment performance with zero defaults demonstrated the viability of the model and enabled it to scale. In the subsequent expansion phase, this success attracted Bank of Baroda, whose involvement was supported by a combination of the proven repayment track record and the availability of government subsidies for solar equipment. Under the Bank of Baroda structure, borrowers made a 20 percent down payment, while the remaining 80 percent was disbursed directly to solar panel manufacturers, preventing misuse of funds and simplifying verification. SEWA provided a community-based repayment guarantee, substituting social trust mechanisms for physical collateral, while SEWA Bank managed loan recovery on behalf of Bank of Baroda. In addition, the loan product design required that the solar panels and the loans provided for their acquisition be registered in women's names, linking women to asset control and ownership from the outset.

Government subsidies further reduced the credit risk by covering a percentage of the costs of the solar panels. Because these subsidies were paid directly to the Bank of Baroda after installation and verification, they significantly minimized repayment risk and administrative effort. Across both phases, repayment schedules remained aligned with seasonal salt harvest cash flows, reinforcing consistent repayment behavior. The resulting financial structure combined blended finance, CSR funded first loss guarantee, income-based credit assessment, community-based trust mechanisms, and public subsidies to create an affordable, low-risk, highly scalable credit model tailored to low income women salt farmers.

Key design features of the financing model were:

• Risk-reduced lending: Guarantees, subsidies, and simple down-payment terms lowered lender risk and made credit affordable for low-income women. Credit risk assessment focused on women's demonstrated repayment capacity, evaluated through income from salt production and projected savings from reduced diesel use. In addition, while potential carbon revenues were not formally treated as collateral, they formed part of the broader context of SEWA Bank's assessment.
• Women-centered ownership: Loans and assets were registered in women's names, enabling real ownership, agency, and financial records that could be used to verify gender co-benefits.
• Trust-based collateral mechanisms: Traditional asset-based collateral was replaced by SEWA's community-level repayment guarantee, which functioned as a social substitute for collateral and was a central element of the credit risk mitigation strategy.
• Season aligned repayment: Repayment schedules were explicitly aligned with the salt production cycle and seasonal cash flows, reflecting when women generated income and reducing the risk of delinquency while supporting continuous use and maintenance of the solar pumps.
• Sustained empowerment through regular financial engagement: Regular financial engagement normalized women's role in production, strengthened their financial and decision-making power, and ensured solar pumps functioned as durable, income-generating assets rather than short term project inputs, further reinforcing lenders' confidence in sustained repayment.
• Supporting women's asset ownership: The project deliberately addressed long-standing structural barriers by transitioning women from diesel pumps to solar pumps and formally registering both the loans and the solar pumps in women's names. This design choice targeted interlinked constraints such as energy poverty, financial exclusion, and women's lack of control over productive assets, ensuring that women held ownership and decision-making authority from the outset.
• Sharing carbon revenues: The shift to solar pumps generated carbon credits through avoided emissions, and 90 percent of the resulting carbon revenues were distributed directly to the women pump users. This revenue flow strengthened women's economic position and reinforced their role as primary stakeholders in the project.
• Training and peer learning: To further strengthen women's technical capability and leadership, the project established women's user groups to manage solar panel allocation, facilitate peer learning, and channel community feedback. Local women were also trained as community energy champions, increasing their visibility, technical skills, and leadership both at home and within the broader community.

These were not incidental features. Each design choice directly shaped the incentive structure for sustained technology use, the distribution of economic benefits, and the accountability of project governance.

2.1.3 Replicability of the SEWA Case

The SEWA solar pumps project was made possible by several distinctive features that would limit direct replication. The presence of a long-standing cooperative network (SEWA), the extensive organizing capacity of the women salt farmers, and high levels of trust in community-based guarantees created enabling conditions that many carbon project contexts do not naturally possess. The financing architecture that combined concessional lending, CSR-funded first-loss guarantees, community-based collateral substitutes, and government subsidies also created a level of affordability and risk sharing not commonly available in most carbon project settings.

Even so, the case presents a number of highly transferable lessons for designing gender-intentional financial structures elsewhere. While the exact mix of subsidies and cooperative infrastructure may not exist in other contexts, the underlying design principles are replicable: structuring credit and payments in women's names, aligning repayment with income cycles, simplifying verification through direct disbursements, and replacing traditional collateral with trusted local mechanisms. These features can be adapted. In this way, the SEWA case should be seen not as a model to copy exactly, but as an illustrative case demonstrating how financial design can simultaneously expand women's economic agency and empowerment and strengthen the integrity of carbon projects.

Emerging approaches from other contexts show that these principles can be applied with different tools and at different scales. The FairClimateFund's clean cooking initiative in Rwanda (Box 3) pays women digitally, routing cashback incentives from the carbon revenues directly to women through mobile money, embedding both the empowerment pathway and the evidence trail in the platform architecture rather than through a cooperative structure.

Where the SEWA/VNV project relied on institutional relationships and cooperative trust to structure women's access and ownership, the FairClimateFund case demonstrates that digital financial infrastructure can perform the same function where there is no local coordinating organization like SEWA. The mobile money channel can simultaneously enable women's financial control and generate transaction-level records that substantiate participation and benefit distribution claims.

2.2 Evidence of Women's Empowerment and Carbon Integrity in the SEWA Solar Water Pumps Project

Financial transactions data can confirm if women are accessing and using financial tools consistently. What it cannot confirm is whether deeper changes have occurred: shifts in agency, decision-making power, or control over household resources. For that, a different approach is required. CGAP supported SEWA to obtain W+ certification, an independently verified, results-based framework that measures gender co-benefits across defined empowerment domains as detailed in Box 2. The assessment focused on 'Income and Assets', and 'Education and Knowledge', the two domains where the project's financial and technical design was expected to have the most impact. A baseline survey designed to capture women's economic conditions, agency, and the gender-specific barriers they faced, combined with a structured endline assessment, which measured changes in earnings, asset ownership and control, financial capability, market engagement, technical skills, and decision-making power.

The results below are organized around the four integrity risk categories outlined in Figure 1 — Delivery Risk, Permanence Risk, Governance Risk and Claims, and Reputational Risk. We describe how the SEWA project's financial design generated gender co-benefits, which addressed each of these risk categories, resulting in stronger project performance. The SEWA case study ultimately shows how access to finance and control of productive assets have given the women salt farmers greater agency, autonomy, and economic resilience while at the same time contributing to project performance.

2.2.1 Women's Asset Ownership Addresses Delivery Risk by Driving Operational Performance

Sustained delivery of emissions reductions depends on women consistently operating and maintaining the assets that generate them. SEWA data confirms that this condition is met. Ninety-seven percent of women reported proficiency in operating and maintaining the solar systems, and 94 percent reported confidence in installing, monitoring, and repairing them. Seventy-one percent reduced reliance on diesel pumps, and 61 percent reinvested in additional solar panels or components. These behaviors indicate ownership rather than surface participation and reduce the risk of asset abandonment or reversal. Loan and asset registration in women's names provides the financial records that make these performance outcomes verifiable.

"I learned how to repair solar panels myself. Once, when our motor stopped working, I fixed it without calling anyone. This confidence has changed the way I see myself."

These technical gains translated into tangible improvements in operational efficiency and wellbeing. With solar pumps reducing the physical demands of salt production, 87 percent of women reported lower labor intensity, and 90 percent noted having more discretionary time. The resulting productivity gains and cost savings have strengthened household resilience.

"Before solar pumps, we had to spend half our income on diesel. Today we save more than 80,000 Rupees ($850) each season, which we use to buy goats and cows. These animals give us extra income even after the salt season ends."

2.2.2 Women's Economic Empowerment Addresses Permanence Risk by Sustaining Adoption and Use

Long-term permanence depends on women having stable economic incentives to continue using and maintaining project assets. The project achieved this condition. Solar-based production increased women's annual gross income by more than 240 percent, and savings from reduced diesel use strengthened net earnings.

"…Now with solar, my income is steady, and I have cleared my loans. For the first time, my savings account has money in it."

With higher incomes, 89 percent invested in housing improvements, 71 percent purchased vehicles, 33 percent acquired land, and 54 percent expanded income-generating activities. Household spending patterns reflected improved welfare, with substantial portions of income allocated to food, children's education, clothing, and healthcare. Ninety-four percent reported confidence in training peers, reinforcing long-term usage and reducing dependence on external technicians. These patterns indicate stronger resilience, sustained participation, and lower permanence risk.

2.2.3 Women's Leadership and Voice Addresses Governance Risk by Building Social Legitimacy

Elite capture — the concentration of a carbon project's benefits, resources, or decision-making power in the hands of local elites rather than the intended beneficiaries — is most likely when benefits are opaque and women's voices are limited. In the SEWA/VNV project, women's user groups manage solar panel allocation and channel community feedback, embedding accountability into the operating model. These structures, combined with the women's growing technical and financial skills, strengthened governance outcomes.

"When the government officials visited, I explained the solar park project myself. I was nervous, but I realized I can speak on behalf of my sisters."

In this case, negotiation capacity rose from 6 percent to 93 percent, market access improved for 73 percent of women, and understanding of loan terms increased from 13 percent to 73 percent. Sixty-seven percent also reported greater confidence in managing loans. At the household level, 84 percent of women reported more influence in decisions, 70 percent contributed to school expenses, and 64 percent were more involved in education decisions.

"Earlier, men made all decisions about salt prices. Now, I negotiate with traders and talk directly. We fix the rate together, and they respect us."

Together, these shifts from participation to leadership substantially reduce the risk of elite capture, enhance transparency, and strengthen the project's long-term governance integrity.

Source: WOCAN 2025, quotes from participants at baseline and endline interviews

2.2.4 Verified Empowerment Outcomes Address Claims and Reputational Risk by Strengthening Co-Benefit Integrity

The evidence in sub-sections 2.2.1 through 2.2.3 demonstrates that the project's financial services design elements generated tangible gender co-benefits. In this sub-section, we address a different and equally important question: how do those outcomes become credible evidence for buyers and standards bodies?

Transaction data and usage records establish that women participated and engaged with financial tools, but they cannot establish that deeper changes in agency, decision-making, or economic control occurred. This is precisely what W+ provides. Through independent third-party verification against defined domains and documented baseline-to-endline comparisons, W+ converts outcomes that are real but unverifiable from operational data into evidence that buyers and standards bodies can assess and trust.

The SEWA/VNV project verification confirmed that reported changes were measurable, attributable to the project, and free of significant harms, with overall performance scored at +3 (Very Much Better) across both domains measured, 'Income and Assets' and 'Education and Knowledge' (SAN 2025). The financial records generated by the project's credit design — including asset registration, loan documentation, and repayment histories — provided an additional auditable evidence layer that strengthened gender co-benefit claims without duplicating the verification process.

Figure 4 summarizes evidence from the SEWA case study against the four integrity risk categories discussed in Chapter 1 that shape carbon project performance: delivery, permanence, governance, and the credibility of claims.

The SEWA/VNV case demonstrates how financial services can contribute to gender co-benefits within carbon projects, as well as how rigorous certifications such as W+ can help projects more effectively measure these co-benefits. However, the use of gender-intentional financial services also provides opportunities for carbon projects to pursue alternative, lower-cost approaches to co-benefit measurement. In Section 3, we compare the SEWA/VNV measurement approach to those of two other carbon projects in which gender-intentional financial services are a core component.

3. Financial Services and the Measurement Continuum for Gender Co-Benefits

While approaches such as those used by W+ are essential for making robust claims about gender co-benefits, including empowerment outcomes, the use of financial services also creates additional opportunities to substantiate these co-benefits and strengthen the overall integrity of project claims.

As we noted in Section 1, women's usage of financial services can provide evidence of both their participation and engagement in carbon projects. For example, in projects where women receive payment in exchange for their contributions to mitigation outcomes, evidence of women's participation can be gleaned from digital payment records. Similarly, when women borrow for asset purchases, projects can derive evidence on women's engagement through data on digital loan repayments.

In this section, we compare SEWA/VNV's use of W+ to measure gender co-benefits with two carbon projects in Sub-Saharan Africa. Carboneers operates a biochar carbon removal project in Ghana, fully financing the production infrastructure and training for participating farmers. It uses digital payments to channel compensation directly to women's accounts, generating account-level records that document participation.

CAVEX is a digital platform that works with PAYGo clean energy providers in Tanzania, Kenya, and elsewhere to provide access to carbon markets, with a focus on digital MRV at all stages. It leverages loan repayment data, combined with other digitally collected data, to measure women's engagement. Figure 5 provides an overview of these three projects' approaches to measuring gender co-benefits, showing how they each sit across the measurement continuum, the financial services pathway that anchors each one, and the integrity claim each can support.

FIGURE 5. Three Cases Across the Measurement Continuum

3.1 Leveraging Payment Records for Participation Verification

Carboneers operates a biochar carbon removal project in Ghana with 7,794 smallholder households across 10,211 hectares. Women account for roughly 60 percent of participating farmers, with 567 in leadership positions in farmer associations and cooperatives (Carboneers 2024). At set up, Carboneers provides participants with biochar inputs, mobile phones, and SIM cards, plus training to produce biochar and run their mobile money accounts. The carbon revenue is channeled directly to women participants' mobile money accounts rather than through male household heads, which makes their participation visible in the project's own data infrastructure.

The revenue-sharing model allocates 50 percent of carbon revenue to the developer and 50 percent to participating farmers, reconciled at year end against verified issuance. The design serves two purposes simultaneously: (1) equitable benefit sharing, a baseline requirement in most carbon standards, and (2) verifiable benefit sharing, because mobile money transfers generate time-stamped, account-specific records that can be reconstructed without relying on self-reported survey data.

A 2025 CERES assessment reports income increases of 14 percent for cocoa, 38 percent for corn, and 572 percent for soybean among participating households, with the soybean figure reflecting agronomic gains plus new commercial scale cultivation (CERES 2025). The gains came from a combination of biochar applied to soils, agronomic training, and input access. Carbon revenue adds further supplementary income of roughly 1,011 cedis, or USD 92, per household. The analytical significance of these figures lies less in their absolute size than in their source: they are traceable to specific women's accounts and therefore available as evidence rather than estimates.

When a project can show, at the account level, which women received payments and when, claims about gender participation cease to be narrative and become verifiable.

This Carboneers project illustrates what participation evidence looks like when financial services design is built to provide equitable access to carbon revenues. When a project can show, at the account level, which women received payments and when, claims about gender participation cease to be narrative and become verifiable. Account-level payment records make participation claims auditable and provide the base layer on which engagement and outcome measurement can be built. They do not, on their own, measure how women use those funds or exercise decision-making power within households and communities. Those are distinct empowerment questions that require a different set of evidence.

3.2 Engagement Evidence Embedded in Financial Services Usage

CAVEX is a cloud-hosted digital platform operated by 4R Digital that manages end-to-end transactions between carbon buyers and investors and the projects on the ground generating positive climate impacts. The platform hosts the data, transaction, and verification layer that connects project participation, asset usage, and benefit flows to carbon credit issuance.

The CAVEX pilot relevant to this paper, supported by the Gates and Shell Foundations, covered 71 women across two clean energy use cases. Burn Manufacturing supplied cookstoves for Kibanda (roadside food vendor) owners in Kenya and Tanzania, and Davis & Shirtliff supplied solar water pumps for women smallholder farmers in Kenya.

In both cases, the women took on consumer finance rather than a development grant and repaid through PAYGo mobile money installments tied to asset use. In the pilot, questions about time use, household decision-making, and income were collected through a mobile-based application, rather than through parallel enumerator visits. CAVEX reported a 45 percent reduction in monitoring and evaluation costs compared to a survey-based benchmark (4R Digital 2025). With the data pipeline and user relationship already in place, the marginal cost of adding an empowerment indicator is close to zero.

Repayment data provided the engagement evidence. The pilot found that women cookstove borrowers maintained a 98 percent repayment rate, and women on the solar water pump portfolio repaid at 107 percent of schedule against 92 percent for the smaller group of male borrowers with the same product (4R Digital 2025). These are not empowerment indicators, but they are credible proxies for sustained engagement with the financial product and, by extension, for sustained use of the asset driving the carbon outcome. For a market that has struggled to evidence cookstove usage distinct from adoption, a repayment record functions as a usage record investors and auditors can rely on.

With the data pipeline and user relationship already in place, the marginal cost of adding an empowerment indicator is close to zero.

The CAVEX pilot demonstrates what engagement evidence looks like when it is generated by the financial services relationship that already delivers the asset. For developers working in distributed technology markets, the marginal cost of measurement drops sharply once that relationship is running, absorbing measurement costs into the cost of doing business.

3.3 Outcome Verification Through the W+ Standard

Independent outcome verification under the W+ Standard sits at the empowerment end of the measurement continuum. Section 2 showed how the W+ verification that was used in the SEWA/VNV pilot measured change across two of W+'s six empowerment domains ('Income and Assets' and 'Education and Knowledge') through a gender-sensitive baseline and endline assessment with independent third-party audit. Where measured change exceeds the W+ threshold, the assessment generates W+ credits that are separable from the underlying carbon credits and can be sold individually or bundled with them. The SEWA/VNV project verification issued 54,888 such credits, turning outcome-level evidence into a tradeable asset rather than a narrative claim.

Two features distinguish W+ from the participation and engagement evidence in Sections 3.1 and 3.2. First, W+ verification is not run on a fixed schedule. It is triggered when a project expects that meaningful changes in empowerment outcomes have occurred. Between verifications, the everyday financial transaction records show whether the changes documented at the last assessment are still in place.

Second, structured outcome assessments surface findings that operational data cannot. The SEWA/VNV assessment flagged that 62 percent of women still cited limited access to financial resources as a major barrier, that male family members continued to lead market negotiations despite women's improved skills, and that climate variability continued to threaten production stability (WOCAN 2025). Findings like these reduce delivery and permanence risk by giving developers and buyers concrete signals about what still needs to be improved.

Cost is also a consideration for projects that cannot underwrite a full impact evaluation. W+ measures across six empowerment domains (income, time, knowledge, leadership, food security, and health), with projects typically assessed and verified on two of them. Assessment and third-party verification together currently run around USD 75,000. For comparison, developers typically face USD 100,000 to USD 300,000 for conventional carbon credit registration alone (WOCAN 2025).

3.4 From Measurement to Market Credibility

Together, the three cases outlined above show that gender co-benefit evidence is feasible across the measurement continuum. Carboneers proves that it is feasible for verifying participation and benefits, CAVEX for engagement, and SEWA/VNV for outcomes. But none of them show that buyers will pay a premium for measured gender co-benefits. The harder problem is coordination between demand and supply. Projects will not invest in better measurement without a price signal, and buyers will not pay a premium without credible measurement, leaving gender co-benefits in voluntary carbon markets today largely a 'narrative exercise' (Roy Choudhury, personal communication, 2026) rather than verified and priced outcomes.

Projects will not invest in better measurement without a price signal, and buyers will not pay a premium without credible measurement.

The cases here show that the tools to move beyond narrative evidence exist. What is missing is buyer demand at the scale projects can supply. Buyer behavior in voluntary carbon markets follows herd patterns. Two or three early movers can shift the reference point for the rest. The gap can close from the supply side, through measurement standards that make outcomes tradeable, or from the demand side, through a small group of anchor buyers that lifts reference pricing, and most durably, through both.

A 2025 WOCAN market sizing study estimates addressable demand for measured gender co-benefits as modest but growing, and identifies outcomes-based funding and sustainability-linked bonds as the most promising medium-term demand pools (WOCAN 2025a). Box 4 sets out the figures, what developers can realistically expect from the current voluntary carbon market, and the chicken-and-egg problem that limits investment in gender co-benefit measurement today.

Most projects are not yet set up to do what these three cases show is possible. Three gaps need to close through financial services designed around women's participation, verification that matches evidence to the strength of the claim, and incentives that make better measurement worth the cost, particularly for smaller and first-time projects. As Box 4 shows, market signals are beginning to reward measured gender co-benefits but remain too thin and uneven to drive investment on their own. Section 4 sets out what project developers, financial service providers, standards bodies, buyers, and funders each need to do to make proportionate measurement a routine practice.

4. Market Development Strategy and Recommendations for Gender Co-benefits

As the preceding sections have shown, financial services can function as infrastructure for women's empowerment and for integrity in carbon markets. However, the market has not yet fully aligned around this idea. As expectations for credible gender co-benefit claims increase, this alignment will become essential for project developers, buyers, investors, and standards bodies. Box 5 sets out the three constraints that explain why this alignment has been slow to take hold, even where the case for it is strong.

Our analysis of the SEWA, CAVEX, and Carboneers projects shows that credible gender co-benefits depend on three market functions: financial services that enable women's meaningful participation, verification systems matched to the strength of gender co-benefit claims, and incentives that make high-quality measurement feasible and worthwhile.

The recommendations that follow address each market function with practical actions for each category of actor. They tackle one core challenge from two angles: the design choices that determine whether women's empowerment outcomes occur, and the evidence systems that determine whether those outcomes can be credibly substantiated.

4.1 Ensure Financial Services Enable Women's Participation

Financial services act as integrity infrastructure when they shape who participates, who owns and controls assets, and whether usage patterns needed for mitigation persist over time. Three things are needed to achieve this:

A. Design Financial Products That Support Women's Control and Sustained Engagement

Financial service providers should design financial products that:

• Register both loans and assets in women's names, ensuring ownership and agency are embedded from the outset.
• Align repayment schedules, credit terms, and payment channels with women's cash flow realities to avoid interruptions in asset usage.
• Structure finance so that participation builds women's credit histories, savings, and long-term financial capability, rather than only facilitating asset purchase.

B. Treat Financial Architecture as Core to Project Quality

• Project developers should design credit structures, asset ownership rules, and payment systems from the start, as these choices influence delivery, permanence, and governance risks.
• Buyers and standard bodies should evaluate financial design as a core indicator of integrity, not as a secondary implementation detail.

C. Route Carbon-Related Financial Flows Directly to Women

• Project developers should ensure all payments, including those from carbon revenue, benefit sharing, or performance incentives, flow directly into accounts held by women, creating a transparent, auditable record of who receives project benefits.
• Standards bodies should consider requiring evidence of financial flows when gender co-benefits are claimed and treat payment records as part of MRV.

4.2 Match Verification Systems with the Strength of Gender Claims

Projects generate different types of gender evidence depending on their design. Gender co-benefit verification frameworks should, therefore, not follow a one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, they should:

A. Match Evidence to Claim Strength

• Use routine financial and digital data such as usage logs, payment records, and participation data to substantiate basic participation and inclusion claims.
• Use more robust, outcome-level evidence such as changes in income control, decision-making, or leadership, for agency and empowerment claims, which require more rigorous data collection and independent verification.

B. Use Modular, Proportional Verification Approaches

• MRV providers should offer tiered verification modules that match the type of claim a project makes, lowering costs for smaller or less complex projects.
• Standards should codify these evidence tiers, so expectations remain clear and proportionate.

C. Clarify Verification Expectations Clearly in Procurement

• Buyers should specify which evidence tier is required for each type of gender claim and avoid treating safeguard compliance as proof of empowerment.
• Project developers should clearly state the claims they intend to make and invest in data systems that can scale to stronger evidence tiers as needed.

4.3 Incentivize Adoption of Better Measurement

Even cost-effective gender verification remains out of reach for many early-stage or small-scale projects today. Market incentives are needed to drive wider adoption. Three priorities stand out:

A. Subsidize First-Time Verification and Shared Measurement Infrastructure

• Development funders should take project co-benefit measurement into consideration when making funding decisions, rewarding projects that take co-benefits measurement seriously.
• Funders should incentivize investment in improved co-benefits measurement, for example by providing grant funding explicitly earmarked for project investments in better measurement of gender outcomes.
• Funders should invest in shared tools such as standardized survey modules, digital onboarding systems, and interoperable MRV platforms that projects can adapt rather than recreate.

B. Extend Results-Based Financing Tied to Verified Gender Outcomes

• Funders should introduce financing mechanisms that reward projects for generating verifiable gender co-benefits, helping to bridge the gap until gender co-benefits are consistently priced into carbon credit valuations.

C. Ensure Measurement Insights Feed Back into Project Improvement

• Project developers and proponents should use measurement findings on persistent gender barriers to refine financial product design and address the constraints that limit women's full participation.
• Funders supporting gender co-benefit measurement should require that resulting insights inform adaptive management, not just buyer reporting.
• MRV providers should ensure methodologies generate actionable insights alongside buyer assurance, especially on factors that directly affect delivery and permanence.

When financial services, verification expectations, and market incentives are aligned with how women actually influence and benefit from carbon project performance, the market can move from narrative claims to credible, proportionate evidence of impact.

Looking ahead, CGAP will continue to work with partners to translate these recommendations into practical tools for the carbon and financial inclusion sectors, including a forthcoming toolkit to help financial service providers design gender-intentional products for carbon project contexts. Additional work will focus on measurement approaches for nature-based projects, where financial flows tend to be less frequent and less easily digitized than in distributed energy applications.

5. Conclusion

This paper shows that women's empowerment is central to carbon project integrity. Financial services enable women to access, use, and control productive assets; they also create the records that make these outcomes visible and verifiable. When projects are designed around women's participation and supported by proportionate measurement systems, they deliver stronger, more durable mitigation results.

The evidence presented here is drawn from one in-depth case and two early pilots, which illustrate what is possible even if not yet typical across all contexts. This matters for how the lessons here are applied.

Several questions remain open. Whether the empowerment pathways documented in the SEWA case hold in contexts without strong cooperative infrastructure is not yet clear. Whether digital monitoring approaches maintain data quality and participant engagement over longer time horizons requires further evidence. And whether the measurement continuum applies with equal efficacy to nature-based projects, where financial flows may be less frequent and less easily digitized, has not been tested here.

These limitations do not weaken the core argument. This paper shows that financial services can function as integrity infrastructure in carbon markets, structuring women's participation while generating the auditable records needed to verify gender outcomes. The mechanisms through which financial services structure women's participation, generate auditable evidence, and strengthen project integrity are not unique to any single geography, technology or project type. What will look different across contexts are the specific financing structures, verification costs, and institutional arrangements needed to make this work.

Importantly, this is not an argument that depends on buyer demand signals to be actionable. Projects that integrate gender-intentional financial services reduce their own delivery and permanence risk. When women own assets, control income flows, and participate in governance, technology adoption is more consistent, maintenance is more reliable, and the behavioral changes that underpin emissions reductions are more durable. These are project performance gains that developers and investors can act on now, regardless of whether buyers are yet pricing gender co-benefits systematically into procurement decisions.

What the evidence does establish is a practical connection that the market has lacked. Women's empowerment outcomes can be measured proportionately, verified credibly, and linked to the integrity dimensions that buyers and standards bodies assess. Financial services are the infrastructure that makes this connection operational.

However, they are not the only tools available to substantiate the link between gender outcomes and project integrity. For example, digital public infrastructure and broader data platforms, which often also serve as enablers for inclusive financial services, also serve as complementary rails. As the voluntary carbon market continues to define what integrity means in practice, there are growing signals from standards bodies and governance institutions that gender outcomes are gaining recognition as a component of project integrity, not merely a co-benefit.

How the market responds to this recognition, and whether it builds the financial and measurement infrastructure needed to make it operational, will increasingly shape how buyers, standards bodies, and project developers define high-integrity carbon credits.