TIST — Small-Group Tree Planting & Carbon Program (Soroti District, Uganda)

TIST (The International Small Group and Tree Planting Program) was founded in Tanzania in 1999 by Clean Air Action Corporation (CAAC), administered together with the Institute for Environmental Innovation (I4EI). Farmers self-organise into small groups of a handful of neighbours who jointly plant and tend tree 'groves' on their own land while adopting conservation farming practices; the model has scaled to Kenya, Uganda (including Soroti District), Tanzania and India.

According to Verra's own published case study, TIST comprised 239,450 farmers organised in 36,405 small groups, who had planted more than 26 million living trees, independently verified to have sequestered over 6 million tonnes of CO2. Nine TIST afforestation/reforestation projects, concentrated in Kenya and Uganda, are validated and verified under the Verified Carbon Standard, and the programme was the first of its kind to achieve 'Triple Gold' status under the Climate, Community & Biodiversity (CCB) standard. Farmers receive annual per-tree carbon pre-payments plus 70% of net profit whenever credits are sold; non-carbon benefits (fruit, fodder, fuelwood, windbreaks, erosion control) are verified to exceed $8 per tree.

Leadership within TIST's small-group and cluster structures is notably gender-balanced, with roughly half of leadership roles held by women. The programme's main evidentiary limitation is geographic: although it operates in all four countries, Verra's registered and independently verified VCS/CCB carbon-credit projects are concentrated in Kenya and Uganda, meaning audited carbon-revenue flows to Tanzanian and Indian participants are less independently documented than for East African clusters such as Soroti.