African Development Bank (AfDB) and the Association of African Development Finance Institutions (AADFI) have jointly trained development finance experts in Africa on climate finance action strategy and management.
The aim of the training, it was gathered, was to equip participants, particularly those from the financial and private sectors, with knowledge on how to scale up climate actions.
Over 200 development experts attended the workshop.
Africa, it is understood, has been warming progressively since the start of the last century, and in the next five years, according to the UN World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), northern and southern Africa are likely to get drier and hotter, while the Sahel region gets wetter.
WMO’s Regional Strategic Office Director, Filipe Lucio, had said in October 2020 that Africa needed to take action in terms of adaptation and mitigation.
Climate change has contributed to a jump in food insecurity, mosquito-borne disease and mass displacement in the past decade.
Also, the rise in sea levels has led to unusual weather patterns such as Tropical Cyclone Idai, which hit Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe in 2019.
‘This initiative and the bank’s activities in mainstreaming climate finance is to strengthen African countries’ drive to realise their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) goals’, Officer-in-Charge of Climate Change and Green Growth at the AfDB, Al-Hamdou Dorsouma, said.
‘It will also boost partnerships and knowledge sharing on how to pull finance for various climate action projects’.
Coordinator of the African Financial Alliance on Climate Change (AFAC), Davinah Milenge, spoke about managing climate risks and the role of the AFAC.
‘The pan-African alliance aims to put the financial sector at the centre of climate action in Africa’, Milenge said.
‘AFAC brings together Africa’s key financial institutions, including central banks, insurance companies, sovereign wealth and pension funds, stock exchanges, as well as commercial and development banks, to mobilise private capital towards continent-wide low-carbon and climate-resilient development’.
There were presentations and demonstrations of two business screening toolkits – the climate risk and opportunity toolkit and the business carbon footprints toolkit – which were developed by experts from Natural Eco Capital, which coordinated the workshop.
Source: AfDB
Photo source: Tom Stahl
