Bureaucracy Threatening Grass-root Communities Access to Climate Finance in Africa
By Charles Ogallo
Bureaucracy remains a major threat
to African local communities’ access to climate finance, a situation affecting their
efforts to adapt and mitigate climate change, according to a session of the 27th
Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change.
Participants in the session
heard that grass-root African communities have ideas on leading local action that
could help them adequately adapt to climate change, but they face difficulties
in accessing needed financial support.
The session, organized by the
Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA) in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt focused
on closing the gap between grassroots, intermediaries and financial service
providers.
Panelists noted the tough
conditions some financial providers demand from grassroot communities, most of
who do not have adequate financial literacy but have bankable ideas in
adaptation.
"Such conditions make it
very hard for community groups access needed finances and hence community
projects fail to be scaled up. The
bureaucracy in funding access for the community in terms of climate financing
is an existing challenge,” said Rosemary Atieno, the co-founder of women
centers international (WCCI) in Uganda.
.
Atieno
who is also the director of community mobilization for positive
empowerment -COMPE noted that there is
a need of proper approach to change the processes.
Atieno further said the
problem gets compounded by the nature of the organization, more specifically
for those classified as local or community-based organizations.
Charles Mwangi, Head of
Programmes at the PACJA also noted that while local communities have
demonstrable knowledge of it means to adapt to climate change, those with the
means to boost their work were busy concerned with procedures and process.
“This frustrate locally led
climate actors at the grassroot,” said Mwangi.
While sharing experience on
community engagement in terms of finding solutions altogether, Mwangi said PACJA initiated a locally led- initiative in
Kenya with the aim of building resilience
of local communities during COVID-19 and learnt that local communities have
immense knowledge that can be utilized to address climate adaptation.
Participants noted that working
with local communities has taught them the lesson that core knowledge is with
local communities and hence procedures of access to finance should be broken to
ease their intervention.
Sylvia Calderon from USAID
Colombia called upon governments to integrate the component of capacity
building of local communities to better understand the dynamics in accessing
climate finances.
"We
need to streamline application processes on financing to ensure that from donor
to the community is easier “she said.
Citing examples from Colombia,
Sylvia said working with communities have shown that "Indeed the communities were at the center of their humanitarian
work and urged that finance controls and power need to be shifted to local
partners to trigger locally led principles”.
Climate finance has been on
the top agenda of COP27. CSOs, and government leaders are discussing on how
climate finance should be geared to address challenges arising from Climate
Change.
COP27 opened on 6th
November, 2022 at Sharm El Sheikh International Conference Center in Egypt with
calls for parties to implement the famous Paris Agreement.
At COP21 held in Paris,
governments agreed that mobilizing stronger and more ambitious climate actions
is urgently required to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement.
The Paris Agreement formally
acknowledges the urgent need to scale up global response to climate change and
that actions must come from governments, cities, regions, businesses and
investors, according to UNFCCC.
Courtesy of PACJA and UNFCCC
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