Field Notes · April 2026
The murky business of clean air
Cornell Business on CarbonWatch Kenya — the SMART dashboard and SMS/USSD system our team built after field interviews with Kenyan farmers and conservancies.
Carbon credits can be a real income stream for Kenyan farmers, and just as often a black box: who buys the credit, who gets paid, and how the money moves. After days on the road with Cornell SMART, our team built CarbonWatch Kenya — a public data dashboard plus low-bandwidth SMS and USSD access — so communities are not left out of their own market.
I presented the work at the 25th annual SMART symposium. Cornell Business later published the story. The piece names me as a project contributor and quotes why the carbon market, politically charged at home, was a chance to be an ambassador of change — and why SMART is about extending a hand from a point of privilege.
We also built SCOUT, an anonymous social survey inside the dashboard, after hearing how women were routinely left out of carbon-market conversations despite providing much of the labor. The full reporting, photographs, and team credits live in the Cornell SC Johnson story embedded below.