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History

Grassroots Economics Foundation (GEF) built and stewarded the historic Sarafu Network and now operates the CLC App. Its commitment-pooling work developed through years of living and learning alongside communities in Kenya that sustained mutual care through shared commitments. Long before digital systems, people made promises to one another and held them through common memory, relationships, and local accountability. The book Grassroots Economics: Reflection and Practice describes this as a commons of commitments: promises that can be exchanged, fulfilled, and renewed without requiring one central authority.

That work was first expressed through community currencies—local ways to record and honor obligations when national currency was scarce. The deeper lesson was not a particular currency. It was a pattern of curation, shared valuation, limits that protect a commons, and exchange that preserves reciprocity. Those lessons informed the Commitment Pooling Protocol (CPP).

From the historic Sarafu Network to Cosmo-Local Credit

The historic Sarafu Network served as a practical learning environment for community currencies and Commitment Pools across communities, schools, clinics, farms, cooperatives, and other local organizations. GEF used that experience to explore how independently governed commitments could be connected without collapsing them into a single dominant market or removing local responsibility.

The service formerly presented as Sarafu Network transitioned to the CLC App at cosmolocal.credit, which GEF operates. This was a transition of the public service and continuing body of work. It does not mean that every historic Sarafu account, wallet, token, voucher, pool, balance, report, participant, or obligation migrated or remains available in the current App.

Cosmo-Local Credit carries forward the history, lessons, open software, and commitment-pooling work. The current product family includes the CLC App, its documentation, and an open protocol for independently governed vouchers and Commitment Pools. Issuers remain responsible for what they promise, Pool Stewards remain responsible for their rules and any guarantees they publish, and communities and institutions can use governance arrangements suited to their circumstances.

One path, in brief:

  1. Community currencies made local obligations visible when cash was scarce.
  2. Commitment pooling developed curation, valuation, limitation, and exchange into reusable protocol components.
  3. The historic Sarafu Network tested and refined those ideas across many real communities and organizations.
  4. The service transitioned to Cosmo-Local Credit without representing that all historic users, assets, records, or obligations transferred.
  5. The current App provides supported wallet, voucher, Pool, and direct-swap workflows; wider routing, clearing, liquidity, insurance, and governance mechanisms remain proposed or deployment-dependent.

Read Concepts and vocabulary for the layers and status terms used across the docs. The Terms of Service govern use of the CLC App. The White Paper presents the wider design, research, and roadmap.

Further learning from Grassroots Economics

These organizational and educational resources provide additional background. They supplement, rather than define, current CLC App and Protocol behavior.