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Nigeria rallies global climate leaders to unlock distributed solar at ecoWise Summit – EnviroNews
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Senior leaders across the carbon market and distributed solar value chain convened in London to advance integrity led climate finance, digital verification and catalytic capital through carbon credits for Sub-Saharan Africa’s energy transition.
The ecoWise Summit London Edition, held on Monday, June 22, 2026, at Imperial College London, convened senior leaders from government, development finance, standards bodies, ratings agencies, legal and governance experts, distributed solar developers, industry and the private sector to examine what it will take for distributed solar in emerging markets to become credible, financeable and procurement ready climate infrastructure for carbon credits.
Organised by Vectar Energy, the summit brought together stakeholders across the carbon credit value chain around three core pillars: Scale, Trust and Capital. Together, these framed a central question for the day: what conditions must be in place for distributed solar carbon credits to move from climate potential into credible, repeatable and procurement ready market infrastructure harnessing carbon finance?
Opening the summit, Deborah Fadeyi, Founder of Vectar Energy, positioned distributed solar as a critical climate finance category sitting at the intersection of energy access, diesel displacement, productive use, SME resilience, health, education, industrialisation and climate finance.
“Distributed solar sits at the intersection of some of the most urgent issues in climate and development,” Fadeyi said. “The deployment needs are enormous. The mitigation potential is real. The development impact is visible. But the financing gap remains structural. Carbon finance can help close part of that gap, not as a silver bullet, but as part of the capital stack.”
The summit opened with a reflection from Dr Tauni Lanier, Sustainable Finance Architect, who challenged the sector to consider what procurement readiness truly requires in emerging markets.
“The shortest path to procurement ready climate deals in Sub-Saharan Africa is not better templates. It is better intermediaries,” Dr Lanier said. “Intermediaries reduce transaction and translation costs. They cut approval timelines and help procurement frameworks feel less like gatekeepers and more like support.”
Scale: From Project Pipeline to Bankable Portfolios
The Scale pillar examined the structural barriers that prevent distributed solar projects from reaching bankability, including weak project preparation infrastructure, fragmented portfolios, currency risk, small ticket sizes and limited aggregation pathways.
Anita Otubu, Senior Director of the Universal Energy Facility at Sustainable Energy for All, called for carbon markets to become more accessible to distributed solar projects.
“Carbon markets must evolve to better serve distributed solar projects,” Otubu said. “That means simplifying methodologies and lowering monitoring and verification costs so smaller developers can participate without prohibitive barriers. We also need stronger aggregation mechanisms. By pooling projects, we can reduce risk, improve efficiency and make financing tools more accessible to developers who otherwise struggle to reach scale.”
Benjamin Bartle, Principal for Catalytic Finance in Emerging Markets at RMI, outlined the financing architecture required to move distributed solar from pipeline to bankability.
“The path from pipeline to bankability is not a straight line. It is an architecture,” Bartle said. “If we want distributed solar to scale in emerging markets, we need to build the machinery that turns local demand, prepared projects, credible data and appropriate risk allocation into portfolios that capital can hold.”
Trust: Making Environmental Attributes Defensible
The Trust pillar focused on what makes environmental attributes credible, defensible and capable of withstanding institutional scrutiny.
Anubhav Joshi, Senior Associate at MSCI Carbon Markets, presented market intelligence on integrity premiums and the growing importance of quality signals in carbon credit pricing and procurement. His presentation highlighted the market’s increasing differentiation between lower integrity and higher integrity supply, and the implications for renewable energy credits seeking stronger buyer confidence.
David Hynes, Senior Manager at Gold Standard, joined a dialogue on methodology, transparency, governance and the evolving role of digital monitoring, reporting and verification.
“Digital MRV allows for more accurate distributed data collection,” Hynes said. “It can reduce verification costs for developers and enable more frequent issuances, improving cash flow by avoiding long waiting periods. New methodologies aligned with the Paris Agreement are increasingly dMRV enabled, encouraging developers to adopt these solutions as they become available.”
The Vectar Energy team, including Deborah Fadeyi, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Habeeb Mustapha, and Carbon Delivery Programme Manager Dr Kashema Bahago, demonstrated the ecoWise platform’s verification and issuance infrastructure, demonstrating its strong intermediary proposition to close the gap of solar projects not being able to access carbon finance.
ecoWise was presented as a digital MRV and market infrastructure platform designed to aggregate distributed solar projects, connect site level generation to continuous monitoring, standardise developer onboarding and evidence requirements, and support methodology aligned verification and issuance pathways.
Fadeyi described ecoWise as the infrastructure layer required to close the gap between distributed solar’s mitigation potential and the carbon market’s demand for traceable, high integrity environmental attributes. Fadeyi also noted that ecoWise is currently in conversation with corporate buyers looking for high integrity carbon credits to secure forward purchase agreements on behalf of solar projects in Nigeria.
The demonstration showed how ecoWise creates a continuous, traceable and auditable evidence trail from project level generation data through to validation, verification and issuance readiness. The platform was presented as an evidence and aggregation layer that supports, but does not replace, methodologies, verifiers or registries.
Jonathan Chibafa, Founder and Chief Legal Officer at Forge ESG, then addressed governance assurance across the carbon credit lifecycle, including legal, claims and transaction risks. Edwin Ehiorobo, Co-Founder of ecoQuadrant, followed with a demonstration of ecoQuadrant’s AI powered market intelligence platform for African carbon markets.
Capital: Connecting Credible Supply to First Capital
The Capital pillar examined the conditions required to move first capital into distributed solar carbon credit supply.
Ibrahim Abdullahi Shelleng, Senior Special Assistant to the President of Nigeria on Climate Finance, delivered a sovereign perspective on Nigeria’s emerging climate finance and carbon market architecture.
“We are building the infrastructure that will allow climate finance to flow at scale,” Shelleng said, positioning Nigeria as an active participant in the development of credible market conditions for climate finance mobilisation.
Shelleng shared reflection on the path from market conditions to market readiness, connecting Nigeria’s domestic carbon market architecture to the international capital flows needed to support climate infrastructure at scale.
A capital panel moderated by Edwin Ehiorobo featured Caroline Eboumbou, Chief Executive Officer of All On, and Jaclyn Foss, Head of Business Development for Voluntary Carbon Markets at CFP Energy. The discussion explored what conditions move first capital, including catalytic finance, forward procurement, buyer confidence, risk allocation and the role of carbon revenue in improving distributed solar project economics.
Caroline emphasised the importance of aggregation and flexible capital: “Solar developers and asset owners are primarily focused on their core business: providing electricity. Most are not set up to manage the technical and operational requirements of carbon credit participation. That creates a clear need for intermediaries that can aggregate projects under a standardised framework and improve access to catalytic capital.
Carbon finance is particularly valuable because, once secured, it can provide developers with a form of funding that does not require ownership dilution. It can strengthen project economics without forcing developers to give up equity, which makes it an important tool for accelerating growth in the distributed solar market.”
Jaclyn highlighted the demand capital challenge: “The market remains demand driven, but capital is still difficult to deploy. Developers need clear demand signals to justify new projects, while buyers need credible projects to procure from. It creates a chicken and egg cycle: projects need capital to exist, but capital needs confidence in future demand. Breaking that cycle will require stronger forward procurement signals, clearer buyer commitments and financing structures that can support credible supply before issuance.”
The summit also included the proposed launch of the Distributed Solar Conditions Register, a working output designed to capture the operational, integrity, financing and regulatory conditions that institutions believe must be addressed for carbon credits from distributed solar in emerging markets to function as credible procurement infrastructure. The Register will be developed following the summit and used to guide targeted engagement across policy, standards, procurement, financing and implementation.
Collaboration as the Operating Model
The Vote of Thanks, delivered by Ewefola Akintunde, Strategic Advisor at Vectar, named the condition that runs beneath all three pillars:
“Collaboration across sectors is the only way to unlock climate finance with integrity and perfection should not stand in the way of progress as the sector is currently agile and building a case to support carbon finance across distributed solar and very much so proud of the work that Vectar is doing as one of the forerunners and of course as a much needed intermediary to make carbon finance accessible to solar projects in Nigeria.”
