Mar 02, 2023
When the Climate Investment Funds (CIF)’ CEO Mafalda Duarte travelled to Burkina Faso in early 2020, she met in a local forest a young man who had a new bicycle and a new cell phone. She learned that this young man’s job was to go into the forest, and check for fires. His equipment had been made available as a result of CIF funding, but it is not the only thing that helped him protect forests. CIF’s Forest Investment Program also supported local communities in addressing the root causes of forest fires, for example with a shift to safer beekeeping methods. Concessional finance helped provide the know-how and resources for modern beekeeping and much more, supporting Burkina Faso’s rural communities and high-carbon sequestration landscape. This is just one example of the strong impact that the Climate Investment Funds delivered in Burkina Faso, and dozens of other African countries, such as Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Zambia, through our 15 years of existence.
On Monday, March 6, with the African Development Bank (AfDB) and Côte d’Ivoire’s Ministry of Environment, CIF convenes our African partner countries in Abidjan for the ‘Africa Knowledge Exchange: Lessons on 15 years of Impact’ event. This learning event will be opened by Jean-Luc Assi, Minister of Environment of Côte d’Ivoire, Mafalda Duarte and Kevin K. Kariuki, AfDB’s Vice-President for Power, Energy, Climate and Green Growth. It will bring together participants from partner country governments, contributor countries, the private sector, civil society, Indigenous Peoples, local community groups, as well as CIF multilateral development bank partners. After the official opening, participants will be invited to a knowledge fair where seven African countries (Côte d’Ivoire, Republic of Congo, Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Niger, and Zambia), CIF and AfDB will showcase their work on sustainable forests (Forest Investment Program), climate resilience (Pilot Program for Climate Resilience) and Indigenous People and local communities (Dedicated Grant Mechanism).
With this event, CIF aims to promote knowledge-sharing and broker lessons learned from 15 years of climate finance experience in African countries. As partner countries engage with one another in various informal meetings and formal workshops, knowledge will be shared and lessons learned on fighting deforestation, fostering climate resilience and empowering local communities. A focus will be placed on identifying lessons that could be most useful for partner countries that will be implementing the Nature, People, and Climate (NPC) investment program, CIF’s newly launched nature-based solutions investment program.
