Devex Newswire: Local climate warriors struggle to access funding billions

Much of climate financing goes to large international organizations that can navigate the complex application processes. This can leave local groups, often best positioned to address climate challenges in their communities, without the resources they need.

Also in today’s edition: We look at days lost at school due to heat waves, how technological advancements are poised to change every industry, including global development, and ask what Africa can do to reduce its debt loads?  

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Climate cash gridlock

Climate change doesn’t wait around for international bureaucracy to maneuver. Its effects are devastating local communities worldwide now, and they desperately need resources to fight back. But there’s a massive roadblock: getting the money they need.

International climate funds hold billions, but they tend to be designed for big organizations, not the grassroots agencies on the front lines. Complex applications, massive grants that can overwhelm small groups, and a funding model centered around big international intermediaries create barriers that prevent local groups from accessing the resources needed to implement climate solutions tailored to the needs of their communities.

“The climate funds are not built to be nimble and responsive to different [local] impacts, but take a one-size-fits-all approach,” says Paul Mitchell, principal researcher on locally led adaptation and climate finance at the International Institute for Environment and Development. The current structure of climate finance, being channeled through large intermediaries, means that 15%-20% of funds might end up as back-office costs rather than reaching the local level.

The result? Frustration and missed opportunities. Local organizations such as ADPP Angola, for example, build sustainable solutions and work with communities to ensure climate finance has an impact even after project funding dries up, says Evaristo Waya, the NGO’s senior partnerships officer.

Low- and middle-income countries need around $600 billion a year until 2030, and climate funds are exploring ways to make access easier for local organizations. There are a few initiatives underway — the Adaptation Fund recently created a funding window specifically for local organizations, for example, and the Green Climate Fund is prioritizing getting money directly to local groups.

Still, some NGOs say efforts haven't gone far enough. Local organizations need patient, predictable funding in manageable chunks to build resilience, writes Devex contributor Natalie Donback. More streamlined processes, transparency in fund distribution, and support for smaller grants could help local communities to implement effective climate solutions.

“2024 really needs to be the year where we see a shift from a buzzword and an increasing discussion and rhetoric around locally led action for adaptation into real action on the ground backed up by serious finance,” Mitchell says.

Read: Why is so little climate finance going to local organizations? 

Related: Climate adaptation finance must double by 2025. How will that happen? (Pro)

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Sweltering schools

Imagine losing days or weeks of school because it’s simply too hot in the classroom. That’s the harsh reality for over 210 million children who faced scorching temperatures and school closures in just April and May. But a lack of official data likely hides an even bigger disruption caused by climate change.

Heat waves are becoming more frequent and intense, threatening the fundamental right to education for millions of vulnerable children, writes Diego Arguedaz Ortiz for Devex. Climate change impacts are rapidly eroding hard-won learning gains and widening education gaps between and within nations. With billions of children depending on a stable education system, governments need to act.

With 2.4 billion children estimated worldwide in 2023 and over 4 billion children projected to be born over the next 30 years, having an education system that can cope with heat, storms, and floods becomes a central issue for governments.

Education systems just recovering from the losses related to the COVID-19 lockdowns now have to consider high temperatures as a new risk, widening the education gap even further. Extreme heat is increasing on every continent due to the burning of fossil fuels and other human-made emissions and activities that cause climate change.

“This is disastrous for learning,” explains Shwetlena Sabarwal, a lead economist at the World Bank’s education team, which in May published a report on the impact of climate change on education.

“[I]t is telling that we were not able to find official data on how often schools are shutting down due to heat,” she says.

The lack of data led Devex to trawl through media reports and releases from international organizations to get a better idea of the number of children who have missed at least a day of school due to heat-related closures in April and May.

Read: Despite school closures, extreme heat flies under radar for education

Tech for good

Technological advancements are poised to change every industry and global development is no exception. At a forum hosted by the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, an organization focused on strengthening American foreign policy, it was clear many organizations, companies, and industry leaders were already thinking through how new technologies could be applied to the world’s most pressing challenges.

In Ukraine, there’s the implementation of digital public infrastructure, a one-stop shop to access government services and documents, that was funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. In Silicon Valley, there’s a new application from Meta, Facebook’s parent company, that instantly translates a user’s voice into another language — a prototype that was met with gasps from the more than 350 people in the audience, my colleague Elissa Miolene tells me.

And in the global health world, artificial intelligence is now helping scientists battle antimicrobial resistance, the type of infections that occur when bacteria and viruses become resistant to medicines over time.

“It’s critically important for us to be leveraging this technology to do our work better, to be more efficient, to be faster, to be more effective,” said Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, the president and CEO of Mercy Corps, from the stage of Monday’s event. “We’re seeing the use of virtual reality to provide psychosocial support to populations in the midst of all these crises. We’re seeing things like 3D printing in war environments to help build prosthetics; lots of information and analysis in terms of anticipatory actions with weather and other patterns.”

It’s that last avenue specifically that McKenna feels holds the most aptitude for change, something that she said Mercy Corps has explored across the world. In 2022, for example, the organization saw hurricanes heading toward Guatemala — and used a remittance platform to alert users that they may want to send additional money to their families before the disaster hit, especially after Mercy Corps waived the fees to do so.

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Africa’s debt challenge

The call for global financial reforms took center stage at the African Development Bank’s  annual meeting in Nairobi last week, but the spotlight also turned inward, with experts urging African nations to better manage their debt.

Three African countries have already defaulted on debt repayments over the last year, and nearly half of the nations on the continent teeter on the edge of debt distress, exacerbated by soaring interest rates. While Africa accounts for just 1.9% of the global debt total, most is held in foreign currencies, so it’s vulnerable to exchange rate fluctuations. Poor credit ratings mean African nations also pay more to borrow on capital markets.

Speakers at the conference underscored the need for efficient debt management to stave off crises and advocated for prudent spending, macroeconomic reforms, domestic revenue mobilization, and robust legal and regulatory debt frameworks.

But inefficiencies in government spending have escalated public debt across sub-Saharan Africa since 2015, leading to deficit spending. And AfDB chief economist Kevin Urama says Africa loses $650 billion annually to unfair ratings, illicit financial flows, corruption, unwarranted tax breaks, and profit shifting by companies.

“It is a big issue because mobilizing capital is on one side but managing that capital effectively is another side,” he says. Devex contributor Anthony Langat lays out the issues and hopefully what can be done to ease Africa’s debt burden.

Read: African countries urged to look internally to manage debt 

In other news

South Korea pledged more development aid to Africa and broader cooperation with the region over minerals and technology during the inaugural summit aimed at expanding ties between the Asian country and the continent. [AP News]

Public debt in low-income countries reached $29 trillion, or 30% of the global total, in 2023. [AP News]

Italy and other G7 countries are working on a plan to better support clean energy and food security in Africa, with potential announcement of the initiatives as early as next week. [Bloomberg]

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