Benin-Climate Finance Readiness Programme

UNDP, UNEP, and WRI have developed a Green Climate Fund (GCF) Readiness Programme through support from the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU). The Programme will prepare developing countries to effectively and efficiently plan for, access, manage, deploy and monitor financing through the Green Climate Fund as well as other sources of international climate finance. In the six pilot countries of Colombia, El Salvador, Benin, Ghana, Fiji and Nepal (and 3 additional countries to be identified will join the Programme in 2014), the partner agencies will: offer needs-oriented capacity building support in order to enable countries to directly or indirectly access the GCF; help develop national integrated investment roadmaps on the basis of national climate change strategies, plans and policies, including through the active involvement of the private sector; assist in setting up in-country monitoring and tracking systems for climate finance and its effectiveness, and; disseminate lessons learned in the course of the implementation back to the GCF Board and Secretariat in order to support its work in designing GCF operations.

The Programme as funded by BMU is intended to assist countries to be ready for GCF disbursements once operational. However the partner agencies have designed a broad-based menu of support modules to build capacity to absorb and efficiently deploy international climate finance, whether or not it originates from the GCF. To that end, the support will fall along two major lines: capacities for building and strengthening institutions, policies and regulations at the national and sub-national level; and capacities for engaging the private sector, both domestically and internationally, to ensure that public finance is used catalytically. Both will help support countries to make transformative and sustainable investments in infrastructure, transport, and energy sectors, while also tackling the country-specific problems of adapting the agricultural, coastal, and forestry sectors to the effects of climate change.

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