The Easiest Win for Carbon dMRV — PAYGO CRMs

The Easiest Win for Carbon dMRV — PAYGO CRMs

A very insightful question was recently posed to experts in carbon project data: “What are the advantages and disadvantages of the various data collection tools? Kobo, mWater, ODK, SurveyCTO, Upya, and others.”

This is a very timely question, especially in the ongoing debate surrounding the role of digital monitoring, reporting, and verification (dMRV) in the quality and integrity of carbon projects.

While there are numerous notable powerful digital tools, such as ODK, KoBo, SurveyCTO, and mWater, which have long been used for developing and administering surveys at scale. These are primarily survey tools used to gather monitoring data periodically; surveys tend to be disjointed, capturing isolated snapshots rather than forming a continuous, connected record.

For carbon projects, merely demonstrating the delivery of an improved cooking appliance or solar unit is insufficient. Projects are required to demonstrate that these assets continue to deliver measurable impacts year on year, lowering emissions, saving money for households, and improving lives. Yet this kind of long-term, verifiable record is precisely what most monitoring systems struggle to provide.

PAYGO CRMs: the easiest path to reliable, auditable carbon project data.

PAYGO CRMs Matter Beyond Energy access

Over an eight-year period working at the heart of Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) and energy access initiatives, I watched the evolution of PAYGO Customer Relationship Management platforms and their emerging role in carbon data collection, management and their role in providing audit trails of activity data and impact.

PAYGO CRMs were originally designed to run energy access operations at scale, tracking individual consumers and their assets, repayments, company inventory, agent networks, and many other functions.

According to GOGLA, the PAYGO industry has indeed addressed challenges of energy access and financial inclusion for about 733 million people, attracting over $4 billion in investments, largely benefiting rural and low-income communities with access to solar, improved cookstoves, and other important appliances. These figures demonstrate that PAYGO CRMs function not just as operational tools but as massively scaled, audit-ready systems.

PAYGO CRMs have enabled businesses to establish a continuous record linked to specific client and asset profiles, creating verifiable histories over time, precisely what carbon projects tend to struggle with. These CRMs provide the rigor that carbon project are aiming to achieve, providing not merely static snapshots but rather dynamic records that illustrate activity and impact over time.

Evolution of PAYGO CRMs for Carbon Projects

Along with the distributors of energy access products, the PAYGO tech ecosystem has evolved and grown, with service providers like Angaza, Paygee, PaygOps, Upya and d.light Atlas now leveraging IoT technologies to enable monitoring at scale, especially for larger more expensive appliances.

However, from my observation, only Upya has completely embraced the character of a CRM and layered its branding to position itself not only as an operational tool for energy access but also as a record and audit system for carbon projects. The platform now supports onboarding of carbon assets from improved cookstoves to spatial polygon assets for a nature based projects.