This is the second article in a series about clean energy and capital allocation in Brazil. To improve your experience reading it, please check our first article. In the first, we introduced the context, and now it’s time to look at the role that impact capital allocation plays in this context.

The Territory

Chapada Diamantina — the Diamond Tableland — earned its name from rock crystal deposits that 19th-century prospectors mistook for diamonds. Today, the region faces a different kind of extraction. Across eleven municipalities in central-northern Bahia, wind and solar projects now occupy over 2,250 square kilometers of land, an area twice the size of Rio de Janeiro. The municipalities under transformation are Morro do Chapéu, Cafarnaum, Várzea Nova, Gentio do Ouro, Uibaí, Ibipeba, Novo Horizonte, Boninal, Ibitiara, Piatã, Oliveira dos Brejinhos, and Brotas de Macaúbas.

What connects them is not just geography, but a shared experience of rapid territorial transformation in the name of global climate mitigation.

The Scale of Capital

Between 2020 and 2025, at least R$18.7 billion has been deployed across five major renewable energy complexes in Chapada Diamantina. To understand how “impact investment” operates in practice, we mapped part of the Brazilian Reais flowing into these projects.

Enel Green Power — Morro do Chapéu Sul I & II

The Italian Energy Giant

Enel Green Power Brasil, a subsidiary of the Italian state-influenced utility Enel Group, operates two wind complexes in the municipalities of Morro do Chapéu and Cafarnaum.

• Morro do Chapéu Sul I: 172 MW, operational since January 2018
• Morro do Chapéu Sul II: 353 MW, investment of approximately $340 million USD
• Combined: 525 MW across 15 parks with 170 wind turbines

The company claims its projects will avoid approximately 992,000 tons of CO2 emissions annually. Enel publishes annual sustainability reports emphasizing its “Creating Shared Value” model, which positions renewable energy projects as engines of local development.

While Enel doesn’t disclose the exact financing structure for these projects, the pattern is consistent across Brazil’s renewable sector: BNDES provides 70–80% of project financing. For Morro do Chapéu, this (likely) means R$2–3 billion in public money supporting Italian equity returns.

Pan American Energy — Complexo Eólico Novo Horizonte

The Oil Company’s “Green” Expansion

Pan American Energy, controlled 50% by British oil major BP and 50% by Bridas Corporation (itself split between the Bulgheroni family and China’s state oil company CNOOC), inaugurated its first Brazilian project in July 2024.

The complex spans 2,700 hectares across six municipalities: Novo Horizonte, Boninal, Ibitiara, Piatã, Oliveira dos Brejinhos, and Brotas de Macaúbas. Ten wind parks house 94 turbines generating 423 MW. Total investment: R$3 billion

Here’s where it gets interesting. The financing structure breaks down as follows:

• R$900 million from BNDES (the Brazilian development bank)
• R$300 million from Banco do Nordeste
• R$1.8 billion in equity from Pan American Energy

In other words, 40% of the capital came from Brazilian public banks — taxpayer money — financing a project 50% owned by British Petroleum and 25% owned by a Chinese state oil company.

The company admits that only 35% of the energy is contracted via long-term agreements, with 65% exposed to merchant market prices. Translation: this is a speculative bet on future energy prices, not a guaranteed development project. The 3,200 jobs? Temporary. The permanent workforce? Undisclosed.

Casa dos Ventos + ArcelorMittal — Babilônia Centro

The Record-Breaking Deal

This is the crown jewel of Brazil’s renewable energy “transition” — and the clearest window into how impact capital actually operates.

Complexo Eólico Babilônia Centro is a joint venture between Casa dos Ventos (Brazil’s largest wind developer) and ArcelorMittal (the world’s second-largest steel producer, headquartered in Luxembourg).

Located in Morro do Chapéu and Várzea Nova, the complex features 123 wind turbines with 553.5 MW of installed capacity, generating enough electricity to power 1.37 million homes. Total investment: R$ 4.2 billion

Here’s the breakdown:

• R$3.16 billion (75% of total) from BNDES
• R$1.04 billion (25%) in equity, split 55/45 between ArcelorMittal and Casa dos Ventos

This R$ 3.16 billion BNDES loan represents the largest renewable energy financing in the bank’s history. It’s 80% of the total project cost — meaning Brazilian taxpayers are financing Luxembourg’s steel production.

But it gets even more interesting. Casa dos Ventos, often presented as a Brazilian success story, is now 34% owned by TotalEnergies, the French oil and gas giant. In October 2022, TotalEnergies invested $550 million for a 35% stake in Casa dos Ventos’ entire portfolio.

So the actual ownership of Babilônia Centro breaks down as:

• 55% ArcelorMittal (Luxembourg/India)
• 30% Araripe family (Brazil)
• 15% TotalEnergies (France)

The project operates under a 20-year corporate Power Purchase Agreement with ArcelorMittal, renewable for an additional 15 years. This is “the largest corporate renewable energy contract ever signed in Brazil,” supplying 40% of ArcelorMittal’s Brazilian electricity consumption.

The project is wrapped in the language of transformation. BNDES president Aloizio Mercadante called it evidence of “BNDES’s commitment to large-scale renewable generation projects in the search for an increasingly sustainable energy matrix for Brazil.”

ArcelorMittal’s president in Brazil, Jefferson De Paula, framed it as part of the company’s “global goal of being carbon neutral by 2050 and reducing specific emissions by 25% by 2030.”

Casa dos Ventos’ executive director Lucas Araripe described the project as evidence that “our wind projects in the Brazilian semi-arid region are motors of social change: they generate jobs, intensify the economy, and boost municipal tax collection.”

The project claims it will avoid 950,000 tons of CO2 emissions annually. It promises 1,500 direct jobs and 3,000 indirect jobs during construction. After completion? Just 80 direct employees and 150 indirect workers.

ENGIE Brasil — Serra do Assuruá

The French State-Backed Giant

ENGIE Brasil, 68% owned by French utility ENGIE (itself 23.64% owned by the French state), is developing one of Latin America’s largest wind complexes in Gentio do Ouro, 600 kilometers from Salvador with an investment of R$ 6 billion.

The Serra do Assuruá complex will comprise 24 wind parks with 188 turbines generating 846 MW — the largest wind project in Latin America when fully operational.

ENGIE reports creating “approximately 3,000 direct and indirect jobs” during construction. The first 15 turbines began commercial operation in August 2024.

ENGIE partnered with Bahia’s state labor department (SETRE) to provide 60 training positions for jobs like “multipurpose bricklayers” and “reinforced concrete structure erectors.” Half the positions were reserved for women. The courses lasted 120 hours.

The company also points to R$5 million invested in social projects, including programs like “Mulheres do Nosso Bairro” (Women of Our Neighborhood) with 100 initiatives and “Parcerias do Bem” (Partnerships for Good) involving 45 companies.

Statkraft — Ventos de Santa Eugênia

The Norwegian Government’s Brazilian Venture

Statkraft, 100% owned by the Norwegian government and Europe’s largest renewable energy company, inaugurated its largest wind farm outside Europe in February 2024.

Located in Uibaí and Ibipeba across 489 hectares in Bahia, the Ventos de Santa Eugênia complex features 14 wind farms with 91 turbines generating 519 MW. The project generates 2,300 GWh annually, enough to supply 1.17 million Brazilian homes. A 163 MW solar farm is being added to create one of Brazil’s first hybrid renewable projects.

Total investment: BRL 2.5 billion (approximately $452 million USD at 2020 exchange rates)

The financing structure reveals the pattern:

• BRL 1.06 billion (42% of total) from Banco do Nordeste, Brazil’s regional development bank, using resources from the FNE (Constitutional Fund for Financing the Northeast)
• The loan has a 24-year term
• The remaining BRL 1.44 billion came from Statkraft equity

Deutsche Bank Brasil issued inflation-linked financial guarantees covering part of the outstanding balance.

Statkraft reports running an educational program in 40 schools in Uibaí and Ibipeba, with 806 participants and 167 educational actions. The project employed almost 2,000 workers at peak construction.

Who Owns Brazil’s Green Energy?

These five projects tell a larger story. In May 2024, researchers from University College London and BOKU University Vienna published a peer-reviewed study in Nature Sustainability examining land appropriation for renewable energy in Brazil.

Their findings are stark:

“Global investors and owners, mainly from Europe, are involved in 78% of wind and 96% of solar photovoltaic parks” in Brazil. These projects occupy 2,148 km² of land for wind and 102 km² for solar.

The study describes this as “green grabbing” — “the large-scale appropriation and control of (undesignated) public lands, both formally legal and illicit, for the development of wind and solar photovoltaic power.”

While 89% of wind parks are owned by Brazilian entities on paper, the majority (68%) are actually subsidiaries of internationally controlled companies, particularly from Italy and France.

The Public Banks

Understanding who finances these projects is crucial to understanding the capital flows.

BNDES: The World’s Largest Renewable Energy Financier

The Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (BNDES), Brazil’s national development bank, has become the world’s largest financier of renewable energy.

According to data from BloombergNEF, BNDES provided approximately $35 billion USD in renewable energy financing between 2004 and 2022. Updated figures show $36.4 billion for the period 2004–2023.

Since 2000, BNDES has financed approximately 70% of Brazil’s increase in generation capacity, corresponding to 78.8 GW of additional capacity, 86% from renewable sources.

In the wind sector specifically, projects financed by BNDES represent 57.5% of total installed wind capacity in Brazil, which totals 28.7 GW.

Banco do Nordeste: The Constitutional Fund

Banco do Nordeste (BNB), founded in 1952, operates as Brazil’s regional development bank for the Northeast. Its primary funding source is the FNE — Fundo Constitucional de Financiamento do Nordeste (Constitutional Fund for Financing the Northeast) — created by the 1988 Brazilian Constitution.

From 2019 to 2023, BNB invested more than R$31 billion in wind and solar energy projects in the Northeast region. In 2023 alone, BNB made available R$10 billion for renewable energy projects.

The bank’s FNE Sol program, financing small and medium-scale solar installations, exceeded R$2 billion across more than 24,700 operations between 2019 and 2023.

The Interest Rate Advantage: BNB offers interest rates starting at 7.9% per year — well below market rates. As BNB director Aldemir Freire explains: “The interest rates are the differential of FNE Sol. Because we count on Constitutional Fund resources, we can offer our clients the best payment conditions.”

In other words, constitutional resources intended for regional development are being used to offer below-market financing to multinational energy companies.

The Consolidated Numbers

Across the five projects mapped in Chapada Diamantina:

Total Investment: R$18.7 billion minimum

Public Brazilian Money: At least R$8.16 billion (43.6%)

• BNDES (Babilônia): R$ 3.16 billion
• BNDES (Pan American): R$900 million
• BNB (Statkraft): R$1.06 billion
• BNB (Pan American): R$300 million
• BNDES (Enel): ~ R$2 billion (estimated based on typical 70–80% leverage)
• BNDES (ENGIE): ~ R$1.5 billion (estimated based on historical patterns)

Private International Capital: At least R$10.54 billion (56.4%)

• Italy (Enel): ~ R$2 billion
• France (ENGIE, TotalEnergies): ~ R$4.5 billion
• Norway (Statkraft government): R$1.44 billion
• Argentina/UK/China (Pan American): R$1.8 billion
• Luxembourg/India (ArcelorMittal): R$0.57 billion
• Brazil (Casa dos Ventos/Araripe family): R$0.23 billion

The pattern is unmistakable: Brazilian public money finances European private profits, extracted from the land and wind of Chapada Diamantina.

The Impact Label

Every single real of this R$ 18.7 billion is labeled “impact investment.”

BNDES describes its loans as supporting “the energy transition” and “sustainable development.”

BNB frames its FNE loans as promoting “the sustainable development of the region.”

The companies wrap their investments in ESG reports, carbon reduction claims, and social programs. Even BP — through its 50% ownership of Pan American Energy — becomes an “impact investor” when it builds wind farms.

This is the machinery of contemporary capital: oil companies, steel manufacturers, and state-backed European utilities, all unified under the banner of impact. They arrive with balance sheets and Environmental Impact Assessments. They partner with government agencies for workforce training. They sponsor educational programs and women empowerment initiatives.

And they do all of this while appropriating land, displacing communities, and extracting returns that flow back to Paris, Luxembourg, Rome, and Oslo.

The Mechanics

Here’s how the system works:

First: Public banks de-risk private investment. BNDES finances 80% of Babilônia Solar (R$ 3.16 billion). Banco do Nordeste provides R$ 1.36 billion across multiple projects. Brazilian taxpayers absorb the risk while private equity captures returns ranging from 12–20% IRR.

Second: Land appropriation happens through legal mechanisms. Projects acquire long-term lease rights to thousands of hectares. As documented in Nature Sustainability, this follows classic patterns of green grabbing — exclusion of local populations from traditional lands under the banner of environmental benefit.

Third: Returns flow outward. TotalEnergies bought Casa dos Ventos for $2.5 billion. BP owns 50% of Pan American Energy. ENGIE and Statkraft are European multinationals. When energy is sold to Brazil’s grid, profits accrue to foreign shareholders while Bahia’s communities experience displacement.

Fourth: The “impact” label legitimizes extraction. Every real becomes defensible because it’s “clean energy,” “sustainable development,” “climate action.”

The circularity is elegant: Impact capital creates the conditions — land conflicts, community disruption, infrastructure stress — that justify more impact capital to “address” these problems.

The Missing Questions

If this is impact investment, who experiences the impact?

Not the communities: Despite R$18.7 billion in capital deployment, research shows traditional land users face displacement, loss of livelihoods, and environmental degradation. The “temporary construction jobs” talking point obscures the permanent loss of agricultural land and common resources.

Not the Brazilian public: When BNDES lends R$3.16 billion at 8–10% interest, it gets back about R$5.7 billion over 20 years. Private equity investing R$1.04 billion expects R$2.5–2.9 billion back (at 18% IRR). All returns extracted from Bahian land and energy generation. The National Grid buys this energy — meaning Brazilian electricity consumers pay for returns to European investors.

Not the climate: While individual projects reduce emissions relative to fossil generation, the model concentrates land and capital in ways that undermine broader transformation. When oil majors (BP, TotalEnergies, CNOOC) dominate renewable energy through their existing capital advantages, we don’t get energy transition — we get the same extractive actors in green costumes.

The public available data shows that most of the positive “impact” flows to balance sheets in Paris, Milan, Oslo, and Beijing.

What “Impact Capital” Actually Does

The term “impact investment” suggests capital deployed to generate positive social or environmental outcomes alongside financial returns. But examine the structure in Chapada:

The capital structure:

The impact structure:

• Social programs address problems projects created
• “Community development” means adapting to dispossession
• “Capacity building” trains people for temporary jobs
• “Education programs” compensate for schools disrupted by construction
• “Women empowerment” responds to economic displacement

The Global Pattern

Chapada Diamantina isn’t unique. Research across the Global South documents identical patterns: “sustainable development” projects that concentrate ownership, displace communities, and extract returns to wealthy countries and investors while local populations experience deterioration.

The numbers are stark globally: developing countries face a $4 trillion annual investment gap to meet Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Private capital mobilization by multilateral development banks has flatlined at $63–69 billion since 2018.

What Gets Built Instead

With R$18.7 billion, what could transform Chapada Diamantina?

• Community-owned energy cooperatives where returns stay local
• Distributed generation serving local needs first, grid second
• Agricultural infrastructure supporting existing livelihoods
• Water security systems in a semi-arid region facing climate stress
• Education and health infrastructure controlled by communities
• Land tenure security for traditional users
• Genuinely participatory planning where communities determine energy futures

When foreign multinationals and private equity control projects from conception, “community consultation” means managing potential conflict instead of co-creation. When the financial model requires 12–20% IRR extraction over 20 years, the room for local benefit is limited to PR programs.

The tragedy is that the capital allocation system ensures renewable energy follows the same extractive patterns as every resource grab before it: External actors control assets, local communities bear costs, returns flow outward, “development” means adapting to dispossession.

Brazil’s Renewable Energy Pioneership

Brazil didn’t follow the world into renewable energy — it led.

While other nations debated climate action, BNDES became the world’s #1 financier of renewable energy, deploying $36.4 billion between 2004–2023 according to BloombergNEF. Brazil pioneered large-scale renewable financing when clean energy was still considered risky. The country built regulatory frameworks, created financing mechanisms like the Climate Fund, and structured auctions that made renewable energy economically viable.

This wasn’t ideology — it was pragmatism. Brazil recognized that its natural advantages (abundant sun, strong winds, existing hydroelectric infrastructure) positioned it to lead the global energy transition while building a new economic sector. The government bet on renewable energy before it was fashionable, and that bet paid off in installed capacity, technological development, and market creation.

The Paradox of Success

Brazil has everything a successful energy transition requires:

• The world’s largest public financier of renewables
• Positive regulatory environment with simplified licensing (RAS system)
• Government incentives and support
• Private capital flowing in from global multinationals
• Best-in-class project executors (ENGIE, Enel, Statkraft, TotalEnergies)
• Abundant natural resources and ideal geography

Yet despite this perfect storm of advantages, communities across Chapada Diamantina and the Northeast face displacement, environmental damage, and broken promises.

The Brazil Iron case crystallizes the paradox.

Brazil Iron, a UK-based company, markets itself as sustainable mining using “100% renewable energy and green hydrogen” to create “net-zero carbon emissions.” The company promises R$30 billion in investment and 55,000 jobs in Chapada Diamantina. Perfect impact investment story.

But at the execution level over 100 residents of quilombola communities Mocó and Bocaina are suing Brazil Iron in UK courts for “physical and mental health injuries and environmental losses.” Blasting operations cracked homes, contaminated the Bebedouro River (the community’s main water source), destroyed crops, and created hazardous conditions. Brazilian environmental authorities shut down operations in April 2022 for multiple violations. Two quilombola women who were plaintiffs in the case died without receiving compensation.

The “green” project created precisely the conditions that endanger the project itself. Brazil Iron faces legal battles in multiple jurisdictions, operational shutdowns, and reputational damage. The Bahia state environmental agency (INEMA) required the creation of a community accompaniment commission, which local movements dismiss as “nothing more than a requirement to get around the shutdown”.

When communities mobilize against projects, when environmental authorities intervene, when international courts get involved — the R$30 billion investment becomes uncertain. The promised jobs never materialize because the project can’t operate. The “sustainable” label becomes a liability when communities document the opposite.

And Brazil Iron isn’t alone. Wind projects across the Northeast face similar conflicts. Renewable energy curtailment doubled in 2025, reaching 20 terawatt hours, primarily in Bahia and Ceará, leading to significant revenue losses. Indigenous communities report that consultation processes are perfunctory at best, with projects approved in 30 days using Simplified Environmental Reports that bypass meaningful community engagement.

The pattern is consistent: Projects move forward with financial backing, regulatory approval, and impact labels. But lack of genuine community coordination creates operational, legal, and reputational risks that threaten execution and profitability.

In the Brazilian context, we have yet the challenge related to the fact that while the large projects produce huge sums of energy, the communities around are not their main target for consumption, which brings the AI Datacenters to the picture. If it was the case of finding a demand for the supply it would be a perfect fit, but the datacenters don’t consume only energy, they consume large amounts of water, which is already a main challenge for the populations in Chapada Diamantina and Recôncavo.

The Methodology Gap

Impact capital allocation fails not because governments won’t spend (Brazil spent R$ 18.7 billion in five projects alone). Not because private capital won’t invest (European multinationals deployed billions). Not because regulation doesn’t exist (Brazil created comprehensive frameworks). Not because companies lack capacity (these are world-class operators).

It fails because the methodologies and tools for integrating community needs, environmental limits, and long-term sustainability into capital allocation decisions don’t function at scale.

The current approach:

1. Capital decisions made in São Paulo, Paris, Oslo, London
2. Projects designed to optimize financial returns
3. Communities consulted through perfunctory processes
4. Environmental assessments conducted to meet minimum requirements
5. Social programs created to manage disruption, not prevent it
6. Impact measured by capital deployed, not lives improved

The missing tools:

• Community ownership structures that give local populations genuine power over land use
• Benefit-sharing mechanisms that keep returns in place rather than extracting them
• Participatory planning processes with teeth — where “no” means something
• Integrated impact measurement that tracks displacement, environmental degradation, and benefit distribution as rigorously as IRR
• Accountability mechanisms where communities can halt projects that violate agreements
• Data infrastructure that makes community impacts visible to all decision makers

When Success Guarantees Failure

Brazil’s case is uniquely instructive precisely because Brazil did everything “right”:

✓ Government led with vision and capital
✓ Public institutions de-risked investment
✓ Regulation enabled rapid deployment
✓ Private capital flowed in at scale
✓ World-class companies executed projects
✓ Impact labels on everything

And still: community conflicts, environmental violations, operational shutdowns, legal battles, curtailment losses, displacement, contamination.

No amount of capital, no quality of regulation, no sophistication of operators can compensate for the absence of tools that make community needs and environmental limits integral to capital allocation from the beginning.

The Brazil Iron case shows that even “green” projects with “sustainable” labels and “renewable energy” strategies create exactly the risks they claim to avoid — when coordination with communities fails.

The broader Chapada experience shows that R$ 18.7 billion in “impact investment” can flow without transforming actual conditions for people in place.

Making Impact Data Available: The Path Forward

The solution isn’t to stop renewable energy development. Climate change demands the rapid deployment of clean energy infrastructure. The solution is to fundamentally change how capital allocation decisions get made — and that requires new data infrastructure.

This is where Liga Colaborativa dos Povos becomes critical.

Liga Colaborativa — winner of the Prêmio Bahia Sustentável in the Sustainable Social Technology category — is building a data infrastructure that makes impact visible to all decision makers: private investors, public institutions, and crucially, community leaders themselves. Through initiatives like “Escuta Livre e Informada” (Free and Informed Listening), and Sofia (AI agent supporting local leadership in Chapada and Recôncavo) Liga creates systems where communities can document, share, and leverage data about how projects actually affect them.

Liga’s solutions are built considering each human life, its voice and feelings, but with the capacity of expressing the total output of the sum of the voices, with high-precision data, four layer of satellite systems (addressing energy production and distribution, mining activities, rural conflicts and the brazilian biorregions), and sophisticated report-tooling with a privacy layer, blockchain storage, and public acknowledgement of its capacities by both brazilian universities (partners of Liga), the MPBA (Ministério Publico da Bahia, which signed a coordination agreement with Spirals, one of the founding organizations within Liga), and right now in the process of validation within the LIFT Lab program by the Central Bank of Brazil.

The work makes different decisions possible.

Right now, capital flows to renewable energy projects in Brazil because financial returns look attractive on paper. But that paper doesn’t include: community displacement as a risk factor, water contamination as a cost, or lack of local benefit-sharing as a project vulnerability.

Liga Colaborativa’s data infrastructure — built collaboratively with people, cultures, and nature at the center — makes these factors legible. Not as moral concerns to be managed through compliance programs, but as material realities documented by communities themselves that change capital allocation decisions.

When impact becomes measurable through community voices — not only through company-reported ESG scores, but through collaboratively-generated and independently-verified community data — capital can flow differently. Public banks can require genuine community participation. Private investors can price in coordination risk. Communities can negotiate from positions of information power rather than information asymmetry.

Chapada Diamantina shows us the future being built right now. Not the future promised in impact reports and ESG disclosures, but the future experienced by communities watching wind turbines rise on land they can no longer access, solar panels covering fields they can no longer farm, and European investors extracting returns from resources that used to sustain local livelihoods.

That future arrives whether we acknowledge it or not. The data shows it. The lawsuits document it. The communities live it.

But each proposed solution carries within it the DNA of the very system it aims to fix. They risk creating new gatekeepers, demanding new forms of compliance, and further centralizing power under the guise of decentralizing it. This chapter maps this solution layer not to prescribe a cure, but to interrogate a critical question: Why do our best tools so often fail to solve the worst problems?

2.1. The Lure of the Ledger: Transparency Without Truth

The promise of technology-driven transparency is a seductive one. In a realm of unverified claims, the logic of an immutable, tamper-proof ledger is powerful. Blockchain technology, in particular, is pitched as the ultimate arbiter of truth.

On-chain experiments, such as those by Regen Network, tokenize ecosystem services by placing claims of carbon sequestration or biodiversity on a public ledger. Toucan Protocol sought to bring carbon credits onto the blockchain, aiming to create a transparent and liquid market. The theory is simple: sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Yet, the ledger records only what is fed into it. It is agnostic to context, blind to justice, and silent on power. It can just as easily immutably record a flawed or unjust outcome as a righteous one. This is the paradox of transparency without governance. The technology answers “Did this event happen?” but cannot answer the more profound questions: “Was this event fair?” “Was it consensual?” “Did it create meaningful impact, or merely a verifiable data point?”

The Toucan Protocol example is illustrative here. Its initial model involved “tokenizing” legacy carbon credits from the voluntary market. The result? It created a massive, liquid pool of carbon tokens on-chain, but it also inadvertently bridged decades of potentially low-quality credits from opaque registries into the new, “transparent” system. The ledger was transparent, but the assets it represented carried the same old controversies. The technology amplified the speed and scale of the market without addressing the fundamental question of quality, proving that a transparent pipeline can still carry polluted water.

The deeper failure mode is the risk of technocratic colonialism. When the definition of a “verifiable outcome” is determined by distant engineers and financiers, encoded in smart contracts and sensor requirements, it can exclude local, indigenous, and context-specific forms of knowledge. A sensor measuring tree cover growth is blind to the cultural significance of a forest or the social cohesion it provides. The quest for objective data can become a tool of exclusion, silencing the very communities the system claims to help. The problem isn’t a lack of data; it’s a surplus of the wrong kind of data, optimized for investor comfort, not community benefit.

2.2. The Metrics Mirage: Interoperability Without Inclusion

The push for standardized measurement frameworks is a response to the chaos of a thousand different grant applications, each with its own bespoke KPIs. The goal is comparability: to allow capital to flow to the highest-performers based on a common scorecard. Brazil’s adoption of the ISSB is a monumental step towards this global baseline.

But standardization is a political act. It decides what counts and what doesn’t. When the common language is financial (as in built for institutional investors) it naturally elevates what is easily quantifiable and financially material. The spiritual value of land, the social fabric of a community, the long-term resilience of a local economy, these are often the first casualties of the standardization process. They are labeled “anecdotal” or “immaterial” because they break the spreadsheet.

On-chain systems like Gitcoin’s Allo Protocol attempt to solve this by enabling pluralism. They allow communities to define their own metrics and leverage decentralized funding mechanisms like Quadratic Funding to signal value. This is a meaningful step towards inclusivity.

However, this creates a new problem: the interoperability of legitimacy. If one community values “number of trees planted” and another values “increase in local food sovereignty,” how does a global capital allocator compare them? The risk is that the system defaults to the oldest, largest, most financially-legible frameworks (like ISSB or IRIS+) as the lingua franca. The smaller, more nuanced community metrics are then forced to translate themselves upwards to be understood, reimposing the very cognitive tax that pluralism was meant to eliminate. The result is not true interoperability, but a new hierarchy of metrics where those closest to financial logic remain at the top.

This is how a system designed for inclusion can inadvertently reinforce exclusion. A women’s farming cooperative in Kenya may generate profound impact. Still, if its success is measured in “hours of community dialogue” and “seed variety preservation,” it remains illegible to a fund manager in London searching an ESG database for “yield” and “carbon per hectare.” The rails are interoperable, but the languages spoken on them are not. The problem persists: capital flows to what it can understand, not necessarily to what is most important.

2.3. The Interoperability Illusion: Scale Without Power Redistribution

Collaborative platforms and blended finance models are the architectural response to fragmentation. They aim to be the central stations connecting disparate rails, promising to de-risk investments and streamline allocation. Convergence blends capital, Optimism’s RetroPGF rewards positive impact, and Celo’s Climate Collective builds an on-chain ecosystem for regenerative finance.

But platforms are not neutral. They have design biases, fee structures, and governance models. The pursuit of scale often leads to design choices that favor large, already-legible actors over small, context-dependent ones. The platform’s need for efficiency becomes a new form of fragmentation.

Blended finance exemplifies this. The model is sound: use philanthropic grants to absorb first-loss risk, attracting private capital. Yet, the structure often dictates the outcome. The private capital, with its stringent requirements for return and risk mitigation, becomes the tail that wags the dog. Projects are shaped to fit the risk-return profile of the private investor, not the needs of the community. The “blend” often simply allows extractive capital to wear an impact mask, leveraging public goodwill for private gain. The problem of who bears the risk and who reaps the benefit is not solved; it is merely disguised in a complex financial structure.

Furthermore, the promise of on-chain interoperability, that data and assets will flow freely between platforms, hits the hard wall of governance interoperability. A project’s reputation on Gitcoin Grants means little in a traditional blended finance fund’s due diligence process. The legitimacy signals are non-transferable. Each new platform, therefore, doesn’t just add a new tool; it demands that impact suppliers build a new identity, a new reputation, and a new form of credibility from scratch.

This creates the Platform Paradox: every new solution designed to reduce fragmentation instead creates a new, more efficient silo. The goal is not to build more platforms, but to enable sovereign recognition, where a community’s proven impact on one platform grants them trusted status across the entire ecosystem. Without this, we are merely building faster pipes for capital to flow through the same old, broken power structures. We are optimizing for the velocity of capital, not the integrity of its destination.

The central failure of the solution layer is its technocratic obsession with mechanics over power. It focuses on building better ledgers, better metrics, and better pipes, while ignoring the fundamental question: Who gets to decide? Until the power to define impact, to verify truth, and to allocate capital is distributed to the edges of the network, to the impact suppliers and communities, our most brilliant solutions will continue to serve our most stubborn problems.

2.4. The Governance Façade: The Myth of Community-Led Curation

If the promise of on-chain systems was to dismantle the old gatekeepers, a core tenet was decentralized governance. The vision was radical and democratic: instead of a handful of fund managers in glass towers, a global community of token holders would collectively decide what constituted valuable impact. Protocols would be governed by their users; grant funding would be directed by the wisdom of the crowd. This was the great redistribution of power, encoded in smart contracts.

In practice, this ideal has curdled into a new, more insidious form of centralization. The mechanism meant to distribute power — the governance token — has become the primary tool for its reconcentration. This is not a failure of intent, but a failure of design that privileges capital and technical agility over genuine representation.

The Mechanics of Capture

The model is almost universal: participants in an ecosystem are awarded governance tokens for their early activity, liquidity provision, or simply for holding a related asset. These tokens grant voting power on proposals that dictate the protocol’s future, which projects get funding, how parameters are set, where the treasury is allocated.

The flaw is that these tokens are not identities; they are tradeable commodities. They are not one-person-one-vote; they are one-dollar-one-vote. This creates an immediate and powerful incentive for governance capture. The actors with the deepest pockets, like speculative “whales,” venture capital funds, and liquidity-harvesting bots, can and do accumulate vast stores of voting power. Their financial interest is rarely aligned with the long-term, nuanced work of impact creation; it is aligned with maximizing the token’s price or extracting value from the treasury.

The result is a cruel parody of community. A farmer in Kenya has a vote, yes. But her single token, earned for participating in a grant round, is drowned out by a speculator in Singapore who controls hundreds of thousands of tokens bought on a secondary market. The system hasn’t eliminated the gatekeeper; it has simply digitized him and given him a thousand aliases.

The Expertise Gap and the Rise of the Delegation Class

Even when token distribution is fairer, a second layer of exclusion emerges: the expertise gap. On-chain governance is a complex, full-time job. It requires parsing complex technical proposals, evaluating economic models, and navigating labyrinthine voting platforms. The very impact suppliers the system is meant to serve — the conservationists, the educators, the community organizers — are already operating at capacity. They do not have the time to become professional DAO delegates.

This vacuum creates a new professional intermediary: the delegation class. These are individuals or organizations to whom token holders delegate their voting power. In theory, this is efficient. In practice, it recreates the exact same intermediary landscape that the blockchain was supposed to disrupt. Decision-making power coalesces around a small group of technically fluent, well-known individuals within the ecosystem’s inner circle. Their biases, their relationships, and their personal theories of change become the de facto law of the protocol. The power to define impact is merely handed to a new set of priests who speak the sacred language of Solidity and tokenomics.

The governance façade is perhaps the most profound disappointment of the on-chain solution layer. It promised a future where the people closest to the problems would have the power to direct the resources to solve them. Instead, it has built a system where the leverage is held by those closest to the capital and the code, perpetuating the same old distance between the point of allocation and the point of impact — only this time, it’s obfuscated by the glittering illusion of democratic participation.

This article is about the challenge of impact capital allocation itself.

Why does so much capital chase so little impact?

Impact capital allocation is a cornerstone of sustainable development. The urgency to address global challenges such as climate change, inequality, biodiversity loss, and poverty has sparked an explosion in impact-driven capital.

But what does this number mean if it doesn’t translate into real, positive outcomes?

A recent EU investigation found that 40% of $15 trillion in impact assets under management had been allocated without evidence of impact. In other words, capital is flowing — but not necessarily landing where it matters most. The same investigation revealed that investments branded as “impact” are expected to grow by 84% by 2026, reaching $33.9 trillion globally.

The result is a system full of contradictions: regenerative projects can’t access funds, while destructive initiatives qualify as “green” under lax accountability frameworks.

Let’s look at the case of ENEVA, a fossil gas company operating in Maranhão, Brazil. In 2021, it signed a compensation agreement with a quilombola community it displaced — promising each family either two pigs, a dozen chickens, or a small crop plot. None of this materialized. Meanwhile, ENEVA is set to make $17.5 million annually for 25 years, and continues to be recognized as a “sustainable” enterprise under international standards.

This is not an isolated case — it’s a signal of a deeper systemic failure. Also a giant opportunity.

Capital allocators operate across fragmented geographies, sectors, and regulatory systems. Impact startups in Latin America, for instance, must navigate wildly inconsistent demands from banks, NGOs, and Web3-native funds — each requiring different compliance, reporting, and technological integration. This lack of interoperability creates friction, wastes resources, and slows down innovation.

Consider this: According to a research by Flow Partners, in Latin America, fintech startups raised $18.2 billion across 2021–2023, while climate action startups raised less than $1 billion in the same period. This isn’t a reflection of need or quality — it’s a byproduct of structural misalignment between capital and mission.

Standardized frameworks could help, but even those are unevenly adopted.

The ISSB, now endorsed by over 75% of the global economy, was only formally adopted by Brazil, the first country to turn it into the official reporting framework, in 2024. Meanwhile, impact suppliers — those closest to the ground — are rarely able to participate in frameworks written in technical, financial, or bureaucratic language.

This creates a double exclusion: communities don’t receive funds, and capital doesn’t achieve its stated goals. Worse, funders often hesitate to scale proven impact models due to uncertainty, which in turn prevents those models from proving their scalability. It’s a vicious cycle — one that demands a different lens to be understood.

The Geography of the Bottleneck

Impact funding doesn’t move through a single river; it splinters into canals with different rules, gatekeepers, and vocabularies. Each “pipeline” promises access, yet each one adds its own tooling, forms, audits, and timing — pushing learning costs onto the people closest to the work.

Instead of getting simpler as new rails emerge, access gets harder. Every rail arrives with its own platform, verification layer, and “must-have” metrics. Frontline teams learn one system, then a second, then a third — translating the same impact into three dialects to stay eligible.

Legal Fragmentation

Different capital flows require different legal scaffolds — grant law, investment/securities rules, cross-border FX/KYC/AML, tax treatment, consumer protection, and sometimes crypto/foundation regimes. As each new tool or framework arrives, impact suppliers split into two groups:

The first group jumps from opportunity to opportunity until something lands — or they pivot away from impact under the weight of compliance. The second builds internal capacity but shifts scarce resources from delivery to legal/ops.

Over time, a fundraising legal stack emerged as its own industry: grant management platforms, fiscal sponsors, legal brokers, compliance firms, KYC providers, FX facilitators, impact accountants, and boutique “capital readiness” shops. They are useful — and increasingly necessary — but they raise the all-in cost of allocation for the smallest actors.

Picture two opposed pyramids:

1. Relates to access to capital with funders at the top, multilateral agencies below, then infrastructure and service providers, and finally impact suppliers at the base. If the base is the most fragile part, the whole structure is inefficient by design.

2. Relates to the closest distance to impact, with impact suppliers at the top, infrastructure & service providers below, MRV & compliance intermediaries below, and funders at the bottom.

Ecosystem Fragmentation

Impact is cross-sectoral by nature, but money often travels through sector silos that don’t interoperate. Each time a project crosses silos (regen ag → health → education → energy), it pays a “tax” in re-learning indicators, templates, and languages.

For a project doing all of the above, funds typically come faster if the fundraiser picks one trendy axis and ignores the rest — praised as “precision” and “straightforwardness.” Multi-dimensional work becomes a liability in single-issue pipelines.

Finance/Web3 tools claim to streamline flows, yet each funding round still accretes platforms, verifiers, consultants, tech providers, and lawyers — each with a fee and a checklist. The point is not to blame the players; it’s to name the coordination failure among funders who set incompatible languages, tools, and reporting regimes that everyone else must juggle.

Trust Fragmentation

Allocators enjoy the privilege of defining frameworks and verifying results; providers must conform — even when those frames don’t fit reality. Disagreement is often muted to avoid exclusion. This creates a one-way trust structure that increases the fragility of the ecosystem as a whole:

Centralization → fragility (Taleb). The tighter the control of definitions and data at the center, the more fragile the system becomes to surprises: local black swans, context shifts, cultural nuances. Antifragile systems absorb variation and learn from noise; centralized ones break at the edges — precisely where impact is generated.

Second, centralization calcifies knowledge inflows. If trust circulates mainly among allocators and their preferred intermediaries, new information and methods struggle to enter. The result: a credibility discount on those closest to impact, a premium on those fluent in the center’s language, and stalled innovation in allocation.

The MRV Gatekeeper

MRV — Measurement, Reporting, Verification — is how funders (public and private) check that money turned into outcomes. In theory, it’s the bridge from intention → evidence. In practice, it’s where many good projects stall.

Think of three main players: funders (who decide which data “counts”), tech providers (who build tools to collect/store/analyze it), and impact suppliers (who must gather and submit it).

The “largest markets” for MRV live in corporate sustainability, carbon markets, and development finance — where disclosures and audits shape reputations, access to capital, and sometimes license to operate. Dominant frameworks include:

ISSB (which now incorporates SASB) sets investor-focused, IFRS-style disclosure standards centered on financial materiality — i.e., sustainability topics that affect a company’s enterprise value, with industry-specific metrics from SASB.

IRIS+ (GIIN) isn’t a reporting standard but a metrics taxonomy and guidance system for impact investors to define, measure, and compare outcomes across portfolios (often mapped to SDGs).

GRI provides multi-stakeholder sustainability reporting standards grounded in impact materiality — i.e., an organization’s significant impacts on people and the environment — yielding broader accountability beyond investors.

Incentive logistics

Funders fund tools that make their counting easier. When the language stays financial, destructive activity can still “net out” if the penalty is lower than the profit. Tech complies with politics because public policy steers the largest budget: the State.

So the MRV stack often optimizes for what the center rewards — not always what impact providers need.

That’s how a multibillion-dollar oil company can score “green” while a village of fishermen goes uncompensated.

Maranhão’s ENEVA case is illustrative: promised compensation didn’t arrive; the firm still qualifies as sustainable under prevailing disclosure logic.

Innovation ≠ Efficiency

Yes — MRV is innovating fast: satellites, sensors, AI audits, blockchain attestations, community apps. But every new tool adds setup, training, and subscription costs. For small teams, the cost of proving impact can exceed the cost of creating impact.

A new intermediary market has emerged to translate MRV in both directions: agencies that turn community reality into KPIs/frames the center accepts, and platforms that convert funder templates into human instructions for field teams.

This unlocks some dormant capital, but it also relocates the bottleneck — money flows through more hands, total costs rise, and the smallest actors still pay the steepest price.

Net effect: innovation that should reduce friction often repackages it. The pipeline looks modern; the burden moves downstream.

Language and Power

In ancient Rome, grammatici — the masters of language — outlived emperors: whoever controlled the grammar controlled what could be said.

MRV works similarly. When indicators and formats are authored far from the field, farmers, indigenous leaders, teachers, and organizers must translate themselves into a foreign grammar to be seen. Impact must pretend to be impact to be funded.

That grammar creates market incentives: marketing becomes the core function of “impact,” and marketing firms become de facto co-allocators — deciding who “sounds fundable.”

The richer the narrative tooling, the more likely funds are to skew toward presentation over presence in the field.

Fernando Pessoa, the poet, once wrote a poem called Autopsicography where he told us that the poet is a pretender; he pretends so much that he pretends to be pain, the pain that he feels.

In the context of impact capital allocation, he could say the same about the impact-supplier:

The impact supplier needs to be a pretender,
He needs to pretend so much,
That he even needs to pretend to be impact,
The impact that he truly generates.

Introduce yourself, where are you from, and where are you currently based?
I am Gustavo Dorea, better known as Gus. I currently live in São Paulo, Brazil.

Which Web3 projects are you most proud of having contributed to?
The projects I am most proud of having participated in are Bankless Brasil DAO and PoolTogether. PoolTogether was my first experience in a DAO, where I realized the importance and impact of a strong and united community. In this project, I was responsible for creating the Brazilian page for PoolTogether and translating articles and updates about the project. It was actually in PoolTogether that I got to know the Bankless Brasil DAO project, where I was really able to deepen my knowledge of how to structure and manage a DAO, contributing from Discord management to strategic governance definitions.

Summarize your impact within Web3.
It was precisely in PoolTogether that I realized the importance and impact of a strong and united community. At Bankless Brasil DAO, I was truly able to deepen my knowledge of how to structure and manage a DAO.

What is community building to you?
Community building, to me, happens when a product or solution is created together with its community. The members participate from the initial conception, through constant testing and feedback. In return, they enjoy exclusivity and benefits from this product or solution, becoming protectors and active defenders of the business.

What is the point zero of a community, and when can we consider it’s built?
The point zero of a community is to clearly understand its purpose and the reason for its existence, as well as the genuine interests of the people involved. After this initial understanding, it is essential to establish values, rituals, rules, goals, and a clear organizational structure. When these elements are understood and accepted by the members, we can say that the community is built.

What seems like community building, but it’s not?
Something very common, but that is not true community building, is when companies open channels for supposed active participation of users, but in reality they only focus on selling products or promoting offers. There is no genuine interest in people or in building real relationships, just numbers to attract new investments.

How can we nurture active and engaged communities?
Rituals and moderation are fundamental to cultivating active and engaged communities. Rituals such as online or in-person events, clear communication channels, and special moments foster strong connections among members. In addition, giving autonomy for members to propose, lead, and execute ideas reinforces the sense of belonging.

What is the main project that you are contributing to right now?
I currently work at an agency specialized in community marketing. I am responsible for managing the Brazilian community for one of the three largest exchanges in the world by volume, as well as managing the Brazilian social media for one of the largest global blockchains.

Which tools, frameworks, and best practices for community building do you recommend?
I especially recommend the CM School canvas. For those who are starting out or who want to better structure their community, this canvas is an excellent tool because it provides a clear and strategic vision of the path the community should follow.

This conversation with Gus closes out the first season of Meet the Community Builders. Throughout the series, we’ve seen how diverse experiences, from technical development to grassroots organizing, come together to shape thriving Web3 ecosystems. Gus’s journey reminds us that community building is about more than tools and platforms — it’s about people, purpose, and shared values.

We’ll be back with season two, bringing more stories of those shaping the future of Web3 communities in Latam and beyond. Stay tuned!

By Marcelo Silva & Rafael Freire

A Field Report on Green Energy Expansion in Bahia

In March 2025, Marcelo from CeLatam joined a week-long expedition through Chapada Diamantina and Reconcavo Baiano, northeast of Brazil. The invitation came from Rafael Freire, current Coordinator of GAMBA (Grupo Ambientalista da Bahia, one of the oldest organizations fighting climate change in Bahia — Brazil) and founder of Liga Colaborativa dos Povos, who led the expedition.

Together with Rafael, there was a crew of journalists from Folha de S. Paulo, Brazil’s second-largest newspaper.

The goals of the expedition were distinct for each participating group:

• The Folha de S. Paulo team conducted journalistic coverage of the energy transition, from fossil to renewable sources, and its impacts on rural communities.

First article — Announcement of the series of articles.
Second article — Death of a child on the construction site of the renewable energy project, and houses damaged by the construction of roads.
Third article — Local community denounces the destruction of the local bioregion.
Fourth article — Smallholder farmers in Recôncavo demonstrate resilience by reviving traditional practices to confront the climate crisis.

• GAMBA focused on ensuring that local voices — especially those of quilombola and traditional communities — were heard and documented.
• CeLatam joined as an observer to gain a firsthand understanding of the outcomes of impact capital allocation in large-scale renewable energy projects.

This report combines field observations with contextual data, aiming to provide insight into the alignment — or misalignment — between global sustainable investment narratives and their consequences in the Brazilian interior.

This is the first of a three-part series about the expedition. In this first report, we will provide a general overview of the situation that caught our attention. In contrast, in the second, we will report on the impact of the capital allocation there. Finally, in the third, we will showcase the people, organizations, and tooling supporting the grassroots communities.

Chapada, Reconcavo, and Brazil’s Green Energy Expansion

Chapada Diamantina and Reconcavo Baiano are two regions of high environmental, cultural, and economic importance in Bahia. Together, they include dozens of municipalities and hundreds of thousands of residents.

The Chapada, situated at the confluence of the Atlantic Forest, Cerrado, and Caatinga, boasts dramatic topography, waterfalls, and river basins that are critical to the region’s biodiversity. The Reconcavo, surrounding the Bay of All Saints, is historically significant for Brazil’s sugar economy and is home to a dense population with strong Afro-Brazilian roots. It is worth noting that Brazil was the last country to abolish slavery, and Recôncavo was the site of numerous significant revolts.

Before the colonial occupation, which brought enslaved African people to the region to work the land and mining operations, the area was part of the territory of the Payayá people.

These regions are deeply affected by the national and global expansion of renewable energy, considering their whole supply chain of rare minerals mining, land grabbing, and green hydrogen. Brazil has become a major player in green energy, the third country with the largest portion of its energy coming from renewable sources (in 2023, 93,1% of the energy produced in Brazil came from renewable sources).

Globally, green energy financing surpassed US$1.7 trillion in 2023. According to the Brazilian government, Brazil generates 87% of its electricity from renewable sources — compared to a global average of 27% — making it a reference in clean energy. However, the label of clean energy doesn’t take into consideration the damage it causes to the local environment and populations. To some of the players involved in the debate, it is as clean as fossil fuels are to people living far away from where it is extracted.

However, for the local population, those projects don’t come at a low cost. This discussion is not new, and the reader can find huge documentation about how sometimes renewable energy replicate extractivist logic, or destroys sacred places and archaelogical sites.

In Bahia, specifically, a 2022 investigation revealed that wind companies in Bahia have used “contracts signed under pressure,” often without legal clarity, to access community lands. The vast majority of those lands are nature-based service providers and weather regulators, so sometimes, a 1km² of forest destroyed for the sake of the implementation of a renewable energy project, can represent damage to a 100km² surrounding area, generating extra costs for the local population who will struggle to replace that source, the local business environment that will see its costs raise, and the State which will need to include more people in social security programs.

Region Overview

Chapada Diamantina spans 25 municipalities with a population of around 376,000, half of which is rural. The region supports family agriculture, eco-tourism, and cultural traditions rooted in resistance. It’s home to quilombos established since the colonial period, eco-villas, the last remnants of centuries-old indigenous communities (such as the Payayás) that endured genocide in the European colonization of Brazil, and a rich history of mixed cultures. It is also home to essential river headwaters and protected conservation units.

Reconcavo Baiano is home to remnants of the Atlantic Forest and a strong quilombola presence. Historically linked to the sugar trade and Afro-Brazilian culture, the region’s economy today is characterized by a mix of small-scale agriculture, oil production, and increasing pressure from agribusiness and infrastructure development.

Chapada and Reconcavo are perfect manifestations of what, in Brazil, is called Brasil Profundo (Deep Brazil), regions typically located in the country’s interior, where the very cultural heritage and substance (often diluted in the metropolis) that represent Brazil abroad are preserved. Places that defy the picture of Brazil that most people from the coast or abroad have.

According to a report from Maíra Gouveia (researcher and comms specialist at Questtono)

“Deep Brazil reaches people in a truncated, stereotyped and misinterpreted way. Living and working in São Paulo or other major capitals makes our knowledge and impression about our country biased — often out of sheer ignorance. It is said that those who live in São Paulo do not live in Brazil […]”

Apart from its historical and cultural relevance, Chapada Diamantina is the place with the largest source of biodiversity and water in the semiárido (region characterized by dry weather and a lack of sources of water). So the damage to Chapada is damage to an entire region (one of the five regions of Brazil).

Field Accounts: Impacts from the Ground

Disclaimer: Names have been withheld to preserve the safety of community members. All testimonies come from local leadership and residents.

Morro do Chapéu: Quilombo Ouricuri II

For CeLatam, the expedition began in the municipality of Morro do Chapéu, where we visited the Association of Farmers of Reminiscences of the Quilombo of Ouricuri II. The renewable energy project in the region claims to offset almost 1 million tons of carbon (per year) that would come from traditional pollutants. With the “success” (license from the State to sell the energy produced there in the free market) of the project, expansion is on its way, and the Quilombolas know it.

The main idea of the visit was to understand their perception of the impact that a new renewable energy project would have on the local community, comparing their situation with that of a nearby community that has signed an agreement accepting the implementation of a similar project within their territory.

The conversation revolved around their concerns, hopes, and also provided a fantastic opportunity to learn about their shared cultural identity and heritage.

Uibaí: The Cry of the Boqueirões

Uibaí is a small town surrounded by the Caatinga biome. The expedition began here, where local groups organized the “Grito dos Boqueirões” — a community mobilization against ongoing deforestation caused by wind power development. Over 90% of the Caatinga around the city has already been cleared, and the community is concerned about the impact that the expansion of the local project is already having on the community resources.

Some of the concerns included restrictions (by security forces) on access to community areas, unfulfilled promises (less than 5% of the 400+ workers employed in wind projects come from the municipality), and the influx of transient labor that has strained infrastructure and contributed to increasing social challenges.

Community leaders submitted a local impact report to the State Attorney’s Office in 2024. They continue to face intimidation tactics, including threats of lawsuits and public defamation.

Olhos D’Água (Serra Grande): The Starcraft Disillusion

Nestled in a mountainous region, Olhos D’Água is home to a historic quilombo and a solid community of smallholder producers. The community was approached by a “clean” energy company with promises of infrastructure: a bakery, flour mill, and well. Nothing materialized beyond a single small machine and tractor.

Since the implementation of the “clean” energy project, turbine noise in the region disrupts daily life, not just for people, but also for the native wildlife. Predatory animals can no longer detect their prey, altering local ecological balances and forcing species to flee the area. Livestock health has also declined, and agricultural output is falling.

Serra da Bocaina (Piatã): The Mirage of “Green Gold”

Located in the central-southern Chapada, Serra da Bocaína hosts a quilombola population that relies on agriculture and forest-based livelihoods. A “clean energy” company from England received both public and private funding to develop research on so-called green mining. However, evidence of aquifer contamination, deforestation, and illegal mineral extraction has surfaced, violating not only local community rights but also international laws.

In Lagoa dos Bastos, in the same municipality, a tragic case of a child buried in tailings highlights the dangers. Community life is increasingly fractured. Fake news campaigns — spread via WhatsApp and local radio — target quilombola leaders, undermining social cohesion and mobilization.

Campo Grande (Serra da Jiboia): Agribusiness and Water Theft

Campo Grande is a quilombo in the semi-arid Serra da Jiboia region. Historically rich in water and fruit trees, the area now experiences declining rainfall and soil degradation. Local leaders report grilagem (illegal land grabbing) and fencing of previously shared lands.

Although certified as a quilombo in 2007, the community continues to await full recognition and enforcement of its land rights. The use of agrochemicals and land speculation further threatens their ability to sustain traditional farming practices.

Patterns of Harm: When Impact Capital Turns Extractive

From what we heard and witnessed, one of the possible conclusions is that while the initial goal of the projects seems to be establishing a presence in the region, within agreements with the locals and native population., the reality is that there is little to no coordination between the multinationals, local authorities (which are often fragile in negotiations), and the local population.

Although efforts are evident, particularly from the local population who demand very little compensation, it seems that they’re not considered in the equation made by big players in the clean energy industry.

What emerges is a systemic contradiction. Dirty energy from fossil fuels creates the need for carbon offsets. These offsets generate a demand for “clean” energy projects — many of which are built in remote, fragile, or historically marginalized territories.

But instead of supporting sustainable development, these projects shift the environmental and social costs to rural populations.

Some projects in Bahia used “ESG labels” to secure financing while causing “irreversible environmental degradation”, others push for even bolder claims, such as “universal access” to energy via top-down mechanisms, ignoring local rights and traditions, and others just adhere to very traditional ways of stealing land from local population: grilagem.

An important thing to note is that denunciations are not acknowledged only by local populations, according to an investigative piece by Mercado Livre de Energia. “Many promises made by renewable projects go unfulfilled; employment is temporary, and infrastructure rarely materializes.”

So, when we conclude that this topic needs further international attention, mainly to check the price that local population is paying for those projects, we’re not betting alone, we’re just acknowledging an ongoing debate.

This pattern is not unique to Brazil. Across the Global South, renewable energy mega-projects have repeatedly generated harm:

• Ethiopia — Gilgel Gibe III Dam: Disrupted the Omo River ecosystem, affecting 200,000+ Indigenous people reliant on seasonal floods.
• India — Charanka & Pavagada Solar Parks: Displaced farmers, exacerbated caste inequality, and reduced food security.
• India — Western Ghats Wind Project: Met opposition for damaging sacred lands and ecological corridors.
• Vietnam — Small Hydro Projects: Caused displacement, deforestation, and flooding before rollback of over 500 projects.
• Chile — HidroAysén Mega-Dams: Would have flooded wilderness and Mapuche lands before public opposition halted them.
• Colombia — La Guajira Wind Farms: Wayúu communities opposed energy expansion on sacred territory.
• Peru — Alto Mishagua Solar vs. State Projects: Community-led energy brought benefits; top-down initiatives caused tension.

These cases highlight a dangerous paradox: “good” energy, justified exclusively through market logic, often deepens injustice. The world’s most vulnerable end up paying the ecological and cultural price for emissions they did not cause, and that without any compensation.

Ultimately, in the current state of the green energy market, the compensation intended to fund the transition to a more sustainable economy is being used to increase demand for such funds, a favorable outcome from the perspective of corporations receiving impact capital allocations, and a cruel reality for those living the reality of green-renewable energy production.

Tech-oriented solutions for coordination

The reality described above is harsh, complex, and challenging to navigate, but it doesn’t mean that solutions aren’t already in place.

In 2024, Rafael Freire and his team concluded the project Resiliências Climáticas (Climate Resiliency, supported by the European Union and executed in partnership with Brazilian universities) to map, in coordination with the local population, the main fragility spots of local communities in the region of Chapada and Recôncavo regarding how they may struggle to navigate climate change while their main economy is tied to the nature surrounding the cities.

Beyond mapping the risks, the project also presented solutions that are already available for the populations and local authorities to use.

However, one of the most appealing outcomes of the project was the creation of Liga Colaborativa dos Povos (Collaborative League of the People). Initially supported by Fundo Casa, this project connects hundreds of communities from the northeast region of Brazil to report, address, and coordinate on their shared challenges.

But how do they do it?

• Shared talent and community capacity: Users connect, complete their profiles, and access a dashboard of tasks created by local leaders. These tasks enable talents such as engineering, law, finance, and programming to be shared across communities. The fulfillment is arranged between solution providers and local leadership, and users earn points for completing requests.
• Access to critical maps: Liga provides communities with essential maps (e.g., mining operations, energy projects) that are often hidden behind paywalls or bureaucracy. It also includes an interactive map where leaders can log conflicts or events tied to agribusiness, renewable energy, and local populations, helping strengthen collective decision-making.
• AI agent meeting people where they are: An AI assistant speaks local languages and communicates via WhatsApp — the region’s most widely used platform — to receive requests and provide information, ensuring accessibility and relevance for all users.
• Leadership protection and secure communication: The platform safeguards the identities of local leaders, providing them with a safe space to communicate their challenges and coordinate actions within and between communities.

For companies building and implementing renewable energy projects, it’s becoming a tempting alternative to coordinate with the local population on both project implementation and compensation negotiation. Instead of good intentions and appealing narratives, Liga is providing the infrastructure for human coordination on regional development, nature preservation, and respect for local traditions.

However, Liga is not the only project offering such a solution; within the Regenerative Finance ecosystem, there are numerous projects with the same goal.

What makes Liga excel is that it was born out of a collective necessity and the diversity of its stakeholders.

With initiatives like Liga, the future of renewable energy is not as dark as the present.

Conclusion

This report highlights a critical failure in the allocation of impact capital during the global green transition. While billions flow easily into large corporations — often foreign-owned — to finance wind, solar, and hydroelectric mega-projects, grassroots communities struggle to access even modest resources to preserve and regenerate their territories.

It is paradoxical that the very populations whose traditional practices nourish biodiversity and contribute to carbon sequestration must fight legal and political battles to maintain their way of life, while the European and US-based corporations that displace them are rewarded with ESG ratings and public-private subsidies.

Across Chapada Diamantina and Reconcavo Baiano, communities producing some of the world’s healthiest food face chronic underfunding. Their agroecological practices, water stewardship, and cultural preservation receive a fraction of the attention and support given to ventures that, under the banner of sustainability, are actively dismantling the social and ecological fabric of rural Brazil.

The disparity in access to capital reveals a market logic that rewards extraction over regeneration, and scale over depth. Without mechanisms for local accountability, redistributive justice, and community governance, impact finance will continue to function as a smokescreen — hiding harm behind the language of solutions.

It is time to invert this logic: impact capital allocation should aim for its destination, not the middlemen. Instead of having huge compliance departments and mega projects costing billions of dollars, ensure that a diverse team from the local population, paid fairly, is involved in the project design. While macrodata is a necessity, microdata, available within the local population, can reduce failures by offering a closer look.

Introduce yourself, where are you from, and where are you currently based?
Hey, Marcelo! I’m Cush. I’m from Guatemala, based across Latin America.

Which Web3 projects are you most proud of having contributed to?
I’m most proud of contributing to Odisea.

If not Web3, what would you be doing?
Probably working on something related to AI most likely.

Summarize your impact within Web3 in a short paragraph.
Our impact in Web3 is that we run the leading innovation lab across Latin America, conducting market research on the state of crypto and AI in the region. We deliver technical education programs, host hackathons, and run incubation and acceleration initiatives. We also build products, consult teams that want to engage in the region, and back emerging projects. Beyond that, we nurture a culture through events and the arts, creating the foundation for a future of stronger human coordination.

What is community building to you?
Community building to me is building trust with long term relationships and long term alignment.

What is the point zero of a community, and when can we consider it built?
Point zero of a community. I think it’s that shared common goal, and being deeply passionate and excited about what each of us is building.

What seems like community building, but it’s not?
I’d say one area where we probably allocate too much energy is IRL engagements. Sometimes we dive into them without having really clear outcomes or objectives in place.

Can you share with us some communities you admire and why?
I really like the Optimism Collective because they have managed to build a valuable economic and technological stack that they can export to the world. So that’s very admirable.

How can we nurture active and engaged communities?
I think the main goal here would be to ensure that these communities have the resources that they need, basically. Oftentimes, a lot of these communities are lacking economic alignment, and so I think that maximizing that is super valuable.

What is the main project that you are contributing to right now?
Odisea.

Which tools, frameworks, and best practices for community building do you recommend?
I recommend that people get together in person with shared alignment, with shared objectives. But also in the meantime, just meet regularly with your community and connect with them and align with them, and make sure you’re just having a good time. I think that’s also super, super important.

Cush’s perspective reminds us that community building it’s about trust, alignment, and creating real value together. By weaving research, education, product building, and cultural exchange, he is shaping a blueprint for how communities in Latin America and beyond can thrive in Web3. His admiration for models like the Optimism Collective highlights the power of combining strong economic systems with meaningful collaboration. As we close this interview, Cush leaves us with a powerful reminder: strong communities emerge from shared goals, consistent alignment, and the joy of building together.

Through Meet the Community Builders, we’re spotlighting the voices of those working on the ground, experimenting, and building the way for the next generation of Web3 communities. In this episode, we had the pleasure of speaking with Luiz Eduardo Abreu Hadad, one of the pioneers of community building in Brazil. From organizing hackathons and major blockchain conferences to blending surf culture with decentralized movements, Luiz has been contributing in expanding Web3 engagement across Latin America.

Introduce yourself, where are you from, and where are you currently based?
My name is Luiz Eduardo Abreu Hadad. I’m from Vila Velha, Espírito Santo, Brazil, where I continue to live and work in my hometown.

Which Web3 projects are you most proud of having contributed to?
Muda Outras Economias, Cambiatus, the first Ethereum Rio Conference and Gnars DAO.

If not Web3, what would you be doing?
Probably something between surf and tech, maybe fully dedicated to Surfguru.

Summarize your impact within Web3 in a short paragraph.
Since 2018, I’ve helped organize hackathons, meetups and conferences across many Brazilian cities. I’ve collaborated with teams hosting two major conferences at Museu do Amanhã, including Ethereum Brasil 2022. I helped Muda onboard 6,000+ members and contributed to nurturing the ReFi community in Brazil. I’ve been doing a yearly research about the Latin American Blockchain ecosystem since 2020. I was one of the first surfers in the space to receive a DAO sponsorship, traveling the world to create mintable content (NFTs) for Gnars DAO. Recently I got accepted as a Base Brasil ambassador.

What is community building to you?
Community building is the art of connecting people and engaging them around a shared purpose. Communities thrive when built on causes, that’s what truly creates connection. Alignment of values is essential, but so is enjoying the process and creating value for members along the way.

What is the point zero of a community, and when can we consider it built?Point zero is when you clearly define the cause and bring together the first core members who care deeply about pursuing it. From there, it takes time to get things off the ground and reach the momentum where the flywheel effect begins.

What seems like community building, but it’s not?
The traditional “community manager” role that many big crypto corporations try to implement globally. Without a strong cause or purpose, you won’t build a community. And we shouldn’t think about “managing” a community. It’s an organic organization, unique in every case, that should be nurtured and incentivized to engage around its shared purpose.

Can you share with us some communities you admire and why?
I really admire the Bitcoin community. It’s open source, organic, and full of strong incentives. There are donors, people who became successful and give back, countless examples of mutual support, and ultimately bitcoiners are shaping the next generation of finance and payments.

How can we nurture active and engaged communities?
We need passionate community leaders who believe in the cause and have the right incentives to keep building. At the same time, we should set the expectation that the ultimate success of a leader is to transition into being a community member, within a community that doesn’t depend on leaders but thrives through many active members taking on roles that keep it moving toward its purpose.

What is the main project that you are contributing to right now?
Muda Outras Economias and Sherlock Communications.

Which tools, frameworks, and best practices for community building do you recommend?

I like working with OKRs alongside the core team to align on what success looks like and how we can make our purpose a reality. I often use Miro to create online boards and map the OKRs there.

I also apply agile methodology to team management, with at least one meeting every one or two weeks to check in on progress (and usually identify challenges).

To humanize virtual collaboration, I include check-ins and check-outs in meetings — this helps us see how everyone is arriving, what their expectations are, and how they’re leaving.

And finally, I believe everyone should already be experimenting with AI. If you’re not using it, you should start learning how it can boost your productivity and creativity.

Luiz’s journey shows us that community building thrives when anchored in a cause, energized by passion, and nurtured through collaboration. From surfing-inspired DAO experiments to organizing large-scale blockchain events, his story embodies how diverse experiences can shape and strengthen Web3 ecosystems.

For anyone inspired to build, the takeaway is: communities are not managed, they’re lived. Start with a purpose, bring people together, and let the collective energy grow organically.

Stay tuned for the next conversation in our Meet the Community Builders series, as we continue exploring the voices shaping Web3 across Latin America and beyond.

From August 5 to 7, 2025, Rio de Janeiro once again hosted Blockchain.RIO, reaffirming its status as the largest Web3 conference in Latin America. Launched in 2022, the summit has grown steadily.

The inaugural edition set the stage for regional Web3 education and networking, followed by the 2023 festival — a three‑day program attracting around 6,000 participants per day with over 36 immersive hours, combining panels on regulation, tokenization, and sustainability, plus zero‑carbon initiatives.

Each iteration has become more ambitious, with Blockchain.RIO 2025 expecting over 20,000 attendees across two venues in Casa Camolese and Expo Mag (Blockchain Magazine).

The Brazilian Web3 Ecosystem & Rio’s Event Series

Brazil’s adoption of fintech innovations like Pix, alongside progressive regulation and growing institutional interest, has created fertile ground for Web3.

Web3 events are not new to the brazilian ecosystem, and Blockchain.RIO and its spinoffs — including pre-launch events like those at InovaBRA in São Paulo and the Blockchain on the Road series reaching 17 universities — have played a pivotal role in driving awareness and engagement.

Rio, with its cultural vibrancy and history of hosting major global gatherings, has become one of the main epicenters for Brazil’s Web3 transformation.

RWA Stage: Spotlighting a $15 Trillion Opportunity

The RWA Summit at Blockchain.RIO 2025 was set to offer a comprehensive look at how tokenization is reshaping finance, sustainability, and governance in Brazil and beyond.

The program was planned to move through sectoral deep dives: sustainability frameworks, tokenized real estate credit, and consortium shares. Highlighting infrastructure and custody challenges, regulatory bottlenecks that hinder adoption, and the need for legal expertise in compliant tokenization.

The panels planned for the morning featured speakers like Dayana Uhdre and Ariel Scaliter (AgroToken). The schedule of the discussions also included real estate tokenization, with names such as Daniel Coquieri (Liqi), and Cassio Krupinsk (BlockBR) tackling regulatory hurdles, and Paulo Sangali, supported by institutional voices like João Gianvecchio (Banco BV) and João Zecchin (Fuse Capital) .

Later panels expanded the scope to digital transformation, social impact, and agribusiness use cases. Taken together, the stage highlighted both the promise and the frictions of embedding real-world assets into Web3 — from technical custody and infrastructure to regulatory maturity and new business models.

Afternoon sessions broadened the scope into infrastructure, regulation, and sectoral applications. Custody and institutional adoption were in the schedule by Ádrili Sato, Cassimiro Celestino Vieira, Jean Michel Guillot, Luis Ayala, with industry leaders like Pedro Rios (BlockFills), Jean Harddy (Tokeniza), and Diego Consimo (XDC Network). Thiago Rüdiger, Rodrigo Caggiano (Mobiup), Afonso Dalvi, and Eduardo Maceira introduced some of the challenges of real-world use cases.

OG builders such as Rubens Nestein and Afonso Dalvi provided the audience with access to an exclusive perspective from players who helped to shape the industry before it was cool.

Other names were in panels, and as I didn’t had the opportunity to follow all the talks, I trust the reader to check the names and panels here.

I was honored to deliver a keynote on the Real World Assets (RWA) stage, where I outlined one of the most compelling narratives in crypto today: the $15 trillion opportunity in impact capital allocation.

I argued that blockchain offers powerful tools for transparency, verification, and mobilization of capital toward measurable social and environmental outcomes — and that Latin America, with its urgent needs and innovation capacity, stands to lead this movement.

Marcelo Silva

Through Meet the Community Builders, we’re spotlighting real voices behind impactful communities by sharing their stories, challenges, and lessons. In this episode, we had the privilege to speak with Tereza Bízková, co-founder of ReFi Medellín and community lead at Funding the Commons. From Medellín, Colombia, Tereza has been instrumental in advancing public goods funding and regenerative finance initiatives across Web3.

Introduce yourself, where are you from, and where are you currently based?
I’m Tereza Bízková, a Czech tech writer and comms professional based in Medellín, Colombia. I lead community at Funding the Commons, co-founded ReFi Medellín, and contribute to Crypto Altruists.

Which Web3 projects are you most proud of having contributed to?
I think there’s a lot you can accomplish alone: write really sharp copy, create a killer pitch deck, secure grant funding… and that kind of work matters. But the efforts I’m most proud of are the ones that only come to life through others. From running two-day conferences to organizing a community cleanup in Medellín, to me the most beautiful and rewarding experiences are those that rely on collaboration. They’re usually the most complex, but also the most impactful and alive.

If not Web3, what would you be doing?
I did my Master’s in Defence, Development, and Diplomacy, but it only made me more skeptical about the traditional impact world. After graduating, I moved into public relations and worked with small tech startups. I found that I really enjoyed it; PR teaches you to understand something deeply in order to tell its story clearly, and that’s a skill that applies anywhere. So, I’d probably still be working in comms on impactful projects.

Summarize your impact within Web3 in a short paragraph.
Honestly, the simplest way to put it is that I support and test good ideas and the people behind them. Through different formats (such as my HackerNoon articles or season 4 of the ReFi Podcast), I try to make space for stories within a friendly but critical space. I also enjoy working behind the scenes, through strategy, marketing, or coordination, to experiment with cool concepts and help people doing meaningful work have a stronger voice.

What is community building to you?
To me, community building means creating space for exchange: of value, support, and ideas. It depends on regular touchpoints. We humans forget quickly; just think about how many Telegram groups you’re in. Maybe you were intrigued at first, but how many do you still check in on — and why? Chances are, it’s only a few. And honestly, that’s okay. The ones that stick usually offer something meaningful on a regular basis. That value can take many forms: intellectual (learning something new), financial (gaining something through participation), social (building relationships or a sense of belonging), or even just fun.

What is the point zero of a community, and when can we consider it built?
Point zero is when there’s a clear reason to come together: a shared goal, problem, or purpose. That’s when the work begins: mobilizing, listening, figuring things out. Your mission might even shift in the process, and that’s a good thing. You can’t just hand something to people; you have to shape it with them. I think a community is never “built”. Can a garden ever be fully built? Maybe there’s a point you feel happy with where it’s at, but it’s a living organism. Sometimes it’s active and full of energy, sometimes it slows down or needs a reset. People come and go. Priorities shift. But that’s all part of it. What matters is staying honest about why you’re doing it and making space for it to change.

What seems like community building, but it’s not?
I think marketing sometimes gets mistaken for community building, but they’re very different disciplines. I usually see marketing as the “first contact”. It can bring people in, but community building takes much more care, nurturing, and patience. If your focus stays on promotion, short-term incentives, or surface-level engagement, people might show up, but they’re unlikely to stay or contribute meaningfully. Community grows when people feel connected, not just targeted.

Can you share with us some communities you admire and why?
Nouns is a good one, for sure. I recently came across a story about how their community pooled funds to rebuild a school in Uganda, and it really made me want to be a part of it. Learning-wise, I’ve gotten so much value from ReFi DAO, just because of the sheer volume of network and resources it has brought my way. Recently, I’ve had some really good experiences with the POAP community and Web3PrivacyNow. I’m also very bullish on the Crecimiento movement happening in Argentina.

How can we nurture active and engaged communities?
Meet people where they are. In Medellín, for example, we started with a Telegram group but quickly realized most people preferred WhatsApp. Even small shifts like that can make a big difference in how people connect. From there, make sure there’s a role for everyone that aligns with your mission. What does their journey with your project look like? How can they contribute, participate, and feel empowered? At both Funding the Commons and ReFi Medellín, we try to create ways for the most passionate community members to step up, whether that’s by hosting community events or helping shape the direction of our projects. Give people agency and support them as they take initiative.

What is the main project that you are contributing to right now?
Funding the Commons. We are working to advance the public goods funding ecosystem through events, activations, and experiments, bringing together builders, funders, researchers, and organizers.

Which tools, frameworks, and best practices for community building do you recommend?
It depends on the community, and that’s the fun part! You can, collectively, shape it into whatever you want it to be. But one practice I personally believe in is showing up as yourself. Publicly associating yourself with a community can go a long way. It might feel easier to stay anonymous, but when you show up as yourself, it feels more organic and helps build trust. People start to recognize you, rely on you, and feel more comfortable participating (just make sure not to take up too much space, it’s about being the enabler). It also makes you more committed to the people & their success. And while it comes with responsibility, it often means you can take a chunk of that community with you if you ever pivot.

Tereza’s perspective reminds us that communities are living organisms, never fully “built,” but continuously evolving. Her emphasis on creating meaningful touchpoints, fostering agency, and showing up authentically speaks to the heart of what makes communities thrive.

If you’re a builder in Latin America — or simply someone passionate about Web3, take these insights as an invitation to start small, stay honest, and co-create with your people. Because in the end, community building is about connection, adaptability, and shared purpose.

Stay tuned for the next conversation in our Meet the Community Builders series, where we’ll keep uncovering the stories behind the communities shaping Web3 in LatAm and beyond.

This week, we turn our attention to Nigeria to speak with Anthony Annaelechukwu Nduka, a key builder in African Web3 development and education. From leading community growth at Celo Africa DAO to supporting tools like CKash, MiniPay , and BlockchainUNN, Anthony’s work demonstrates what it means to blend education, sustainability, and grassroots energy into a thriving blockchain movement.

Read on to learn how he defines community building, what keeps him inspired, and his advice for nurturing engaged ecosystems.

Press enter or click to view image in full size

Introduce yourself, where are you from, and where are you currently based?
My name is Nduka Anthony Annaelechukwu, a community builder, blockchain educator, and sustainability advocate. I’m from Nigeria and currently based in Enugu, South East, Nigeria where I lead initiatives focused on Web3, digital education, and climate impact.

Which Web3 projects are you most proud of having contributed to?
I’m proud to have contributed to a number of impactful projects, including:

• Celo Africa DAO, where I lead community growth and run a continent-wide contributor program.
• BlockchainUNN, a campus-based blockchain community I coordinate, focused on Web3 education, developer training and ecosystem growth.
• AlphaBlocks, a Web3 educational cohort training African youth in blockchain.
• MiniPay, a dollar stablecoin wallet.
• CKash, a Celo-based self-custodial wallet bringing stablecoin access to African users.

If not Web3, what would you be doing?
I’d be teaching, either in classrooms or within communities, helping young people discover digital skills and sustainable ways to improve their future, or maybe a vet doctor.

Summarize your impact within Web3 in a short paragraph.
My work has centered on grassroots adoption, education, and sustainability in Web3. I’ve trained students, onboarded thousands into crypto, and built ambassador programs. My focus is always on blending blockchain with impact, making it relevant to everyday people.

Press enter or click to view image in full size

What is community building to you?
Community building means creating safe, intentional spaces where people connect with shared purpose, grow together, and co-create value, both online and in real life.

What is the point zero of a community, and when can we consider it built?
A community is built not when it’s big, but when people show up even without incentives, when they start helping each other and building organically from shared values.

What seems like community building, but it’s not?
Gathering an audience or growing followers isn’t community building.

Can you share with us some communities you admire and why?
I deeply admire all the communities I’ve had the privilege to be part of. From university blockchain clubs like BlockchainUNN, which are nurturing young African talent, to global and regional initiatives like Celo Africa DAO, Web3bridge, Women in DeFi, Gida, and AlphaBlocks. Each one plays a unique role in making Web3 more inclusive, practical, and accessible.

How can we nurture active and engaged communities?
Understand what kind of community it is, listen first, set up feedback loops. Celebrate small wins and spotlight community members regularly. And most importantly, keep the community’s mission front and center. People stay where they feel valued and where the impact is visible.

What is the main project that you are contributing to right now?
I’m currently focused on two main areas:

• Celo Africa DAO, where I lead ecosystem growth and manage the contributor program rollout across multiple African countries.
• Plogging Nigeria, where we keep fit to keep clean.

Which tools, frameworks, and best practices for community building do you recommend?

• Google Tools like Forms, Docs, Sheets, etc.
• Community/Social Media platforms like X, Farcaster, WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, etc.

✨ Like this story? Share it on X and tag us to let us know what you think! Stay tuned for more voices from across Celo and beyond, every week in Meet the Builders.