Panel Discussion: Financing Climate Resilience at the 4th Africa Climate Resilience Investment Summit

Barry Maher (Senior Financial Sector Specialist in Crisis and Disaster Risk Finance, FCI), moderated a panel on Financing Climate Resilience at the Africa Climate Resilience Investment Summit, which took place in Johannesburg from March 5-7.

Key takeaways as follows from the panel discussions: 1) Financing climate resilience is a new and emerging area. MDBs are grappling on how to fully integrate targets and resilience investments into their strategies, lending and monitoring platforms; 2) Tranching of risk in a debt structure can crowd in private sector finance, which can result in higher tranches of risk being borne by those with a higher risk tolerance (like MDBs) and lower layers by the private sector; 3) Capacity development is critical, to support potential lendees to develop bankable projects, especially empowering target groups like women and the youth; and 4) Blending concessional finance with commercial finance can be an effective way to leverage public sector funds and crowd in private sector capital into financing climate resilience. However, this is a new and evolving space and is still not main streamed / matured.