Food security
Facilitating access to climate finance to better implement the ECOWAS Regional Climate Strategy (RCS) remains a key concern for ECOWAS Commission. With the support of BOAD, the Adaptation Fund, the Green Climate Fund, the European Union and the French Development Agency, ECOWAS is organising a stakeholders' capacity building workshop to facilitate access to climate finance. The training session will run through 29 October 2024.
The objective of the workshop is to present the methods and procedures for accessing and preparing projects for Climate Funds, while highlighting the key elements of climate and financial engineering for the agricultural sector. More specifically, the training is aimed to (i) improve understanding of the processes for preparing, submitting, managing and monitoring climate projects, (ii) develop skills in drafting climate finance proposals and managing climate funds, (iii) promote the exchange of good practice and experience among participants in identifying climate investments for agricultural resilience and (iv) identify and prioritise ideas for high-quality regional projects to be developed on climate-smart agriculture for submission to the Green Climate Fund.
Indeed, since the adoption of the SRC and its 2022-2030 action plan in June 2022 to support Member States in meeting their commitments under the Paris Agreement to combat the effects of climate change, few countries in the region have been able to mobilize the necessary climate funds due to limited technical capacity in institutional coordination and climate project engineering.
This technical and financial capacity-building session will help experts from the fifteen (15) ECOWAS member countries to mobilize the additional funding of two hundred and thirty-nine million eight hundred and fifty-two thousand one hundred and eighty thousand (239,852,180) US dollars expressed in the countries' NDCs for conditional and unconditional actions by 2030.
The training workshop, which brings together more than forty (40) experts from the ministries responsible for agriculture and the environment in the ECOWAS member states, is benefiting from several supports through the pooling of resources from several ECOWAS projects with a view to building skills for access to climate financing to promote the resilience of the agricultural sector. This includes three projects working on climate resilience, namely the Agroecology Program, the ECOWAS Institutional and State Capacity Building Project for Access to Climate Finance to Support the Implementation of the Regional Climate Strategy, and the Regional Project for the Promotion of Climate-Smart Agriculture in West Africa.