“I am extremely excited and privileged to be part of the first fellowship cohort. [It is] an opportunity to contribute meaningfully to addressing the urgent challenges of climate change,” said Kenya’s Mercy Wanjiru Mwaura when she learned that she had been selected as a 2023 CIF Youth Fellow. Mercy is part of a group of seven young people from Egypt, India, Jamaica, Kenya, Thailand and Tunisia that will be onboarded this week at a CIF Youth Fellowship event in Accra, Ghana. Mercy and her peers came on top of a group of over 3,000 youths that applied to become CIF Fellows.
The CIF Youth Fellowship program is designed to provide professional experience to young climate leaders from developing countries. The seven Fellows will work on climate action projects in their own countries with CIF’s six partner Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) - the African Development Bank (AfDB), the Asian Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the InterAmerican Development Bank, the World Bank (WB), and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), with a focus on clean energy, climate resilience, and social inclusion. The United Nations Office of the Secretary-General's Envoy on Youth (OSGEY) and the UAE-based Arab Youth Council for Climate Change (AYCCC) also support CIF and MDBs on the Fellowship.
CIF will facilitate a series of advanced capacity-building opportunities for the Fellows, starting with the onboarding session in Accra, organized in partnership with the Ghana Climate Innovation Center (GCIC), funded by IFC, and Ashesi University. This foundational phase will empower fellows to make significant contributions to CIF’s mission and MDBs projects over the year. It will provide a comprehensive understanding of the global climate finance architecture, including the partnership between MDBs and CIF, with engaging, narrative-driven instructional design, enriched with case studies, games, and quizzes to optimize learning retention and facilitate self-learning.
GCIC's session will expose Fellows to ethical leadership, critical thinking, gender equality, and other key principles to addressing climate change. Fellows will learn practical and scalable solutions from local initiatives, featuring real-world case studies in areas such as climate finance and sustainable land management. Ashesi University will harness the reach of their intern and alumni network to benefit CIF Fellows. While in Ghana, the group will also travel to Kete-Krachi to visit CIF-AfDB co-financed projects featuring mini-grids and solar photovoltaic energy and consult with local communities.
Each Fellow will then return home to get to work on country projects such as the development of solar rooftop in India, green jobs for youth in Thailand and financial mechanisms for energy projects in Egypt, and benefit from more networking and capacity building opportunities throughout their year with CIF.
The Fellowship is part of CIF’s comprehensive approach to youth outreach. For example, the Youth Adapt Challenge, a CIF partnership with the Global Center on Adaptation (GCA) and the African Development Bank (AfDB), has demonstrated how young African entrepreneurs can scale up solutions to local climate-related problems. The CIF Internship Program brings in young people from different geographies to join our global team at CIF’s headquarters to participate and contribute to our day-to-day work. Our youth engagement also ensures young voices and views are recognized in global forums.