Enabling access to the Green Climate Fund: Sharing country lessons from South Asia

The Green Climate Fund (GCF) was established to support developing countries to take ambitious action on climate change. The flow of climate finance from industrialised to developing countries, particularly via the GCF, is a crucial component of international agreements on climate change. However, capacity constraints and the complex procedures for accessing funding are affecting many developing countries’ ability to compete fairly and effectively for the GCF.

This learning brief provides insights from the Action on Climate Today (ACT) programme in South Asia to improve country ‘readiness’ to access climate finance. A forthcoming learning paper from ACT on enabling access to the GCF presents the ‘demand side’ country perspective on the challenges faced and some of the strategies that countries have employed to overcome them. It presents a framework for strengthening access to the GCF, looking at entry-points and strategies that governments, funders and practitioners can use. Entry-points at the global level include the GCF’s own resources and capabilities, and at the national level includes national institutional capabilities, the design of projects, and the sustainability of financing. The recommendations for employing different strategies at each level, based on learnings from ACT should be particularly useful to the GCF as it undertakes a review of performance and country ownership in 2019.