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History

Grassroots Economics Foundation grew from years of living and learning alongside communities in Kenya who kept mutual care alive through shared commitments. Long before formal markets, people built trust by making promises to one another, and those promises were held in common memory, witnessed and enforced by relationships. In the book Grassroots Economics: Reflection and Practice, this living tradition is described as a commons of commitments: a pool of shared promises that can be exchanged, fulfilled, and renewed without needing a central authority.

That practice first expressed itself as community currencies—simple, local ways to record and honor obligations in times of scarcity. But the deeper lesson was not the currency; it was the protocol: curation of what is acceptable, valuation by shared agreement, limitation to protect the commons, and exchange that preserves reciprocity. This is the path from community currencies to the Commitment Pooling Protocol, a way to make ancient coordination legible to modern networks without erasing local sovereignty.

Sarafu Network emerged as a living laboratory for this evolution—hundreds of communities using commitment pools to exchange credits, repay promises, and build resilience across neighborhoods, schools, clinics, farms, and cooperatives. With each pool, the network learned how to connect local commitments without collapsing them into one dominant market. Over time, the question became: how do we inject liquidity, compost it into local value, and route commitments across a growing web while keeping the trust local?

The Cosmo-Local Credit DAO is the next step in that story: a governance and routing layer that funds the safety commons, supports liquidity mandates, and connects pools so commitments can travel without being turned into speculative money. It does not replace local stewardship; it strengthens it by helping commitments move, settle, and be fulfilled across a network that is now larger than any one community.

One path, in brief:

  1. Community currencies surfaced local obligations when cash was scarce.
  2. Commitment pooling refined those obligations into shared protocols of trust.
  3. Sarafu.Network scaled those protocols across many communities and pools.
  4. CLC DAO adds liquidity composting, routing, and safety governance for the network.