This paper looks at Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) shortcomings for African. It explains that while China and India account for 88 per cent of all CDM credits issued so far, African only has 1 per cent. The main reasons for this disparity are thought to be the high transaction costs and the long and complicated registration, validation, monitoring and verification processes. It can also take up to three years to get carbon revenue, if the project is one of the 13 per cent which make it through to the end. A voluntary carbon market has emerged, partly in response to these CDM shortcomings. There are many players in this market, using many different standards and rules and regulations but there are also high transaction costs and long lead times and therefore the paper argues that they don’t work for typical, small African poverty alleviation projects with low greenhouse gas emission reduction potential. It argues that this has encouraged the development of small, agile carbon registries using simplified standards, which better fit the African projects. One such small registry and one of its poverty alleviation projects are analysed in this paper.