A strong and predictable enabling environment is critical to help countries plan, implement, and accelerate investments in a low carbon and resilient economy. With technical assistance funding, the Climate Investment Funds (CIF) has successfully supported governments to address regulatory gaps, design and execute measures to kickstart markets for green goods and services, and undertake activities complementary to capital investments. CIF’s lessons learned on the crucial role of technical assistance have been collected and analyzed in a new report entitled 'Enablers: The Role of Enabling Environment in Scaling Up Climate Finance'. A launch event hosted by CIF and the UK Government took place in London to formally introduce and share the report findings.
Mafalda Duarte, CIF’s CEO, addressed the launch event participants and said: “In order to achieve ambitious climate goals and ensure our collective future, it's critical for every country to create a strong enabling environment for climate investment built around predictable policies and human and institutional capacities. Through CIF's Technical Assistance Facility, we are helping our partner countries in the developing world do exactly that: removing key barriers to investment, facilitating climate finance flows, and driving more alignment on the ground."
More than a dozen online and in-person speakers discussed key takeaways from the report on financial efficiency, enabling environment and innovation. Perspectives from participating countries were notably shared by Krishan Singh Barguzar, from the State Bank of India and Dipak Patel from South Africa’s Presidential Climate Commission, who said: “CIF's technical assistance (…) went a long way in ensuring South Africa was able to harness domestic and international capabilities and to give more investable and rational content to the intentions contained in the Nationally Determined Contributions. Without this work, we would be making statements of desire rather than of clear intent to move along the investment path. From my perspective, technical assistance forms an early-stage tranche of financing that is required to make projects or programs bankable.”
CIF’s Abhishek Bhaskar provided background to the study and convened a group of experts and donors. Conor Ritchie, Head of Climate Multilaterals in the International Climate Finance Directorate of the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, explained that “technical assistance is not always headline grabbing, but it is very important, and it is very important that we have the information and the evidence to be able to show the impact it is having.” He also shared that “technical assistance done right can help the effectiveness of our development finance and help deliver that transformational change that we are after.”
Representing another CIF-TAF donor, Frank van der Vleuten, Coordinating Policy Officer, Climate Finance & Energy, of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs concluded his remarks by saying that “CIF has found that middle ground of bringing knowledge-rich and knowledge-intensive cooperation to the table while pulling the resources of different funders together.”
This statement echoes the findings of the report, which highlights that “CIF technical assistance has been flexible and nimble to respond to evolving and emerging issues,” further concluding that CIF funding has “successfully kick-started sustainable markets for green goods and services by using technical assistance to support, within a single project, financial intermediaries to supply credit, firms to supply goods and services, and end-users to stimulate demand.”
The 'Enablers: The Role of Enabling Environment in Scaling Up Climate Finance' report, authored by KPMG, is available online. The research lays out key findings and recommendations from an analysis of over 50 projects financed by CIF. It also contains six detailed case studies on the impact of technical assistance funding in Armenia, the Caribbean Basin, the MENA region, India, Indonesia, and Mongolia.