The Southern African Climate Finance Partnership (SACFP) is a multi-country, knowledge sharing and capacity enhancement platform facilitated by SouthSouthNorth since 2016.

The programme has enabled the formation and growth of a climate finance community of practice, including key public and private sector institutions in several southern African countries.

The SACFP seeks to advance national and regional collaboration through programmatic knowledge and innovation brokering.

The core focus of the SACFP is improved access to and implementation of catalytic sources of climate finance, from the likes of the Green Climate Fund (GCF), to attract and enhance investments that address national climate change priorities.

Phase III of the SACFP (2020-2023) is funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). Drawing lessons from prior phases, the programme focuses on providing targeted knowledge brokering support across three interlinked activity areas, namely:

Applied Research – Identify knowledge gaps pertaining to barriers and enablers for accessing and implementing international climate finance and avenues for overcoming these through knowledge brokering; and sharing of emerging lessons through a suite of academic research papers and practitioner-targeted knowledge products.

Capacity Enhancement – Build the capacity of practitioners to develop and implement financially feasible and socially responsive climate related projects through the piloting of a formal practitioner-training programme with a partner academic institution, facilitating peer-to-peer learning exchanges, and the further piloting of a youth internship programme in key institutions.

Targeted Technical Assistance – Facilitate learning engagements between institutions and technical experts to understand emerging policy and process constraints and collaboratively develop solutions through the adoption of innovative tools, resources and strategic approaches; informing on-going research.

The GCF is the largest multilateral fund with a UNFCCC mandate. However, it is just one part of the varied and growing climate finance landscape, and it is currently constrained by a lack of impactful and fundable proposals in its pipeline, with limited cases of coordinated national portfolios that include transformative development pathways at the scale required to address climate change. Stakeholders – including GCF Nationally Designated Authorities and Accredited Entities – face challenges when sequencing and activating transformative project portfolios. The quality, scale, and coordination of project portfolios should be addressed through:

• A systematic, coordinated approach by developing countries accessing the GCF and other climate finance; and
• Partnership, collaboration, learning, and ultimately enhanced capability to coordinate transformative investments.