PureFlow Amanzi brings safe drinking water to rural homes, schools and ECD centres in the Eastern Cape, creating paid work for local women and youth along the way. The carbon credits it generates will pay for what comes next: more rollouts and lasting community infrastructure.
Run by iThemba Kuluntu NPC, a women-led Public Benefit Organisation. GCX is carbon technical advisory partner.
3,000+Households with safer water
15,000+People reached
80+Green jobs and paid local roles for women and youth
350+WASH education, training and follow-up sessions
45M+Litres of safe-water treatment capacityProgramme reach to 2026. Source: iThemba Kuluntu NPC.
In rural Pondoland many households draw drinking water from rivers and streams. Making it safe means boiling it over wood, every day.
That means firewood to collect, smoke in the kitchen and hours lost, with illness when boiling is skipped. Most of that load falls on women and caregivers.
The filter is the way in. The delivery model around it reaches learning, livelihoods, health and the climate, and builds capability that stays in the community.
Gravity-fed filtration without electricity or chemicals, and no more boiling water over a fire.
Safe water and WASH education where children learn and grow, so fewer days are lost to illness.
Paid local roles in assembly, rollout, training and follow-up: skills, income and leadership for women and youth.
Less waterborne illness, and lower clinic, medicine and transport costs for stretched households.
Less firewood burned means fewer emissions, to be independently verified and issued as South African carbon credits.
Trained local teams and trusted delivery that can anchor what comes next, from youth skills to village resilience.
This is what makes PureFlow Amanzi more than a water programme. Once credits are verified, their revenue is planned to flow back into the community: more rollouts, local jobs, and lasting infrastructure that outlives any single project. iThemba has already built community infrastructure with partners; carbon revenue is how it plans to build the next.
1Safe water for homes, schools & ECD centres2Less wood burned, emissions avoided
3Verified South African carbon credits
4Credit revenue5Reinvested in rollouts, jobs & community infrastructure
Built with FNB Care as infrastructure partner and opened in 2025: a free early learning centre where 120 children learn, play and eat every day, with paid roles for local women as teachers, cooks and carers. A Women’s Centre followed in 2026, starting with a gender-based violence programme for young women.
A ring-fenced share of carbon revenue is planned to build Smart Hubs anchored in early learning, with space for youth and skills development, health outreach and protection services, alongside water and sanitation for schools.
No carbon credits have been issued yet: revenue begins once they are independently verified. Planned uses are iThemba Kuluntu’s. The ECD Centre and Women’s Centre were not funded by carbon revenue.
How a household filter grows into long-term change, in six steps.
01The burden of unsafe water falls hardest on women and girls.
02Filters assembled locally and delivered with training and aftercare.
03Safe water and WASH education in homes, schools and ECD centres.
04Paid local roles turn an urgent need into a lasting household solution.
05Health, learning, household savings and women’s livelihoods improve together.
06Stronger village resilience and community self-reliance.
Five steps, delivered by local teams, from the first community meeting to follow-up visits in people’s homes.
01Community meetings come first, so households know what is coming and why.
02Filters are assembled locally, so skills and income stay in the area.
03Handout events reach whole villages, schools and ECD centres at once.
04WASH education at every handout, so filters are used, cleaned and trusted.
05Home visits keep filters working, and produce the monitoring data the credits rely on.
Clean water in the home, and the moment people first see the difference. Watch the programme in action, or read the story of the women at its centre.
This category has an integrity problem, which is exactly why we work conservatively. We would rather quote low than revise downwards later.
Volumes, pricing and the registry process are scoped per buyer against the current methodology. The same project can sit in your carbon budget and your socio-economic development budget, and both help the programme reach more households, schools and villages.
GCX is carbon technical advisory partner: methodology selection, additionality, registration pathway, pricing basis and revenue structuring. It is the same work our Climate and Carbon team does for clients directly. Offsets are the last step in a decarbonisation plan, not a substitute for one; our article on onsetting vs offsetting explains why.