Burning Cotton Stalks Used to Be a Loss. Cameroon Turned Them Into Carbon Credit.
Over 160 participants from across Asia and the Pacific and beyond logged on 21 July for the first session of ICA-AP Committee on Credit and Banking (ICCB)’s new webinar series, Cooperative Finance for the Green Transition, which opened with a question every credit cooperative will eventually face: what does financing sustainable agriculture actually look like on the ground? The series is part of ICA-AP’s capacity-building work under the ICA-EU Partnership Phase II’s #Coops4Dev programme, which equips cooperatives with the tools and knowledge to align their operations with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Mr. K. K. Ravindran, ICCB Chairperson and Managing Director of NAFCARD India, set the scene by pointing to climate-resilient finance already running across the region, crop disaster insurance in Korea, decades of disaster resilience work in Sri Lanka, parametric weather insurance covering over 700,000 households in the Philippines, and cyclone insurance in Fiji. Mr. Bhima Subrahmanyam, President of the International Cooperative Banking Association, followed with a video message carrying a simple warning: cooperative banks are already financing climate-relevant activities like irrigation and dairy, they just need to structure and report that lending to unlock refinancing, and member demand is shifting fast toward solar pumps, EVs and energy-efficient housing. Banks that move early, he said, will capture that next wave of borrowing.
The session’s anchor case came from Dr. Justin Bomda, CEO of Mufid Union, the apex body of 95 cooperative financial institutions serving more than 370,000 members directly, and over a million through affiliated groups, across all 10 regions of Cameroon. Working with GIZ’s rural development project in the country’s cotton regions, Mufid Union built its green transition on three pillars: adapting existing loans to climate risk, developing new climate-smart products like biochar financing and solar kits, and training staff to understand green value chains.
The standout example is biochar. Cotton stalks that farmers used to burn in the open are now converted into a stable soil enhancer that sequesters carbon, with Mufid Union financing the grinders and kilns, pre-financing certification, and buying back the resulting carbon credits, projected at over $2,000 per hectare, paid straight into farmers’ accounts. Three other business cases followed the same logic: certified maize seed expected to double yields, goat fattening loans tied to a dried-meat value chain, and cashew and tigernut processing loans targeting new local food and export markets.
Dr. Bomda didn’t gloss over the costs, training and system upgrades are expensive, local climate data is thin, and market linkages outside cotton are still early. On gender, he flagged that women do most of the work in biochar and crop value chains alike, and ensuring that labor converts into income for women remains a live priority. His closing point: cooperative green finance succeeds by building on the sector’s existing mission, not reinventing it, and no single institution gets there alone.
ICA-AP Regional Director Mr. Balu Iyer closed the session by naming climate risk as a present-day financial reality already affecting loan portfolios, pointing to the Asian Confederation of Cooperative Credit Unions, which has added a “6th C” to its credit risk framework specifically to assess climate exposure. Green products, he said, are no longer a niche interest, they’re the next generation of member demand.
Watch for details on Session 2 of the Cooperative Finance for the Green Transition series, here