A Deliberate and Forward-Leaning Approach: Rwanda is strengthening its readiness to participate in both Article 6 and the Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM) through a strategic and well-coordinated approach that emphasizes environmental integrity, transparency, and equitable benefit sharing. This guiding principle underpins Rwanda’s efforts to build strong institutional capacity, robust regulatory frameworks, and the necessary infrastructure to ensure credible, fair, and sustainable engagement in carbon markets under article 6 of the Paris agreement.
Building Institutional and Infrastructure Foundations: The country is actively building the necessary pillars for market participation. This includes focused work on institutional capacity-building, registry infrastructure development, and policy alignment to credibly support cooperative climate action. The Government of Rwanda, through the Rwanda Environment Management Authority (REMA) the Designated National Authority (DNA) under the Ministry of Environment has made significant progress in carbon market readiness. REMA is responsible for approving and authorizing carbon market projects to ensure their alignment with national sustainable development goals, environmental integrity, and emission reduction objectives.
To support effective participation under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, Rwanda has established key instruments, including:
- The National Carbon Market Framework, which outlines the country’s approach to engaging in carbon markets;
- The Manual of Procedures for Carbon Market, providing step-by-step guidance for developing and implementing Article 6 activities; and
- The National Carbon Registry, designed to track and record Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes (ITMOs), ensuring transparency and preventing double counting.
Together, these tools position Rwanda as one of the leading African countries with a robust institutional and regulatory foundation for carbon market engagement.
Ensuring Alignment with National Climate and Co-Benefit Goals: Ensuring Alignment with Rwanda’s Climate and Development Goals:
This structured approach aims to guarantee that all carbon credit–generating projects directly contribute to the achievement of Rwanda’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) and/or internation mitigation purposes. Each project is required to deliver not only verifiable emission reductions but also tangible social, economic, and environmental co-benefits such as improved livelihoods, ecosystem restoration, and green job creation thereby aligning carbon market activities with Rwanda’s broader national development and climate resilience priorities.
Creating a Rules-Based Pathway for Investors and Developers: The result is a clear, rules-based pathway for market participants. Developers operate under a clear regulatory lens, while investors benefit from open accounting, registry-grade tracking, and the assurance that projects are aligned with national climate objectives, de-risking investments and ensuring integrity.
By laying these structural foundations, Rwanda is positioning itself to leverage both concessional and private climate finance through high-integrity market engagements, ensuring future participation is transparent, equitable, and durable.
Focal Points and Assistants
Bernadin Bavuge
National Focal Point Rwanda
I am environmental scientist holding a master’s degree in environmental economics and natural resources management. I have a professional experience of 12 years working in environment and climate change. I’m contributing to the development and implementation of policy and strategies (e.g: Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC)), national carbon market framework, guidelines related to mitigation and adaptation at national level and provide strategic advice on building resilience to climate change. In addition to the duties of Environment and Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation Specialist, I am the National Focal Point in Rwanda for Article 6.4 mechanism and coordinating the Designated National Authority (DNA) secretariat activities related to carbon markets in Rwanda under article 6 of Paris Agreement.