Raising capital for resilience with public agricultural banks

Context:

The 11 countries of the Great Green Wall (GGW), in addition to Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana are among the world’s poorest and most vulnerable countries to climate change. Those countries are ranked at the bottom of the Human Development Index in 2020 and their current vulnerabilities are leading to a growing food insecurity, youth migration and insecurity.

Client’s need:

To build and scale up the resilience in the agriculture sector, which is the foundation of these countries’ economies with more than 70 per cent of rural communities depending directly on rainfed agriculture (crops, livestock, fishery and forestry), an international public bank contracted finres to jointly raise capital from the Green Climate Fund (GCF) to finance the project IGREENFIN. IGREENFIN aims to support the adoption of robust and profitable climate change adaptation solutions in the agricultural sector. The project comprised phase 1 for five (5) countries and phase 2 for additional seven (7) countries in West and East Africa.

Solutions implemented by finres:

finres provided a detailed climate hazards assessment and a prioritization of adaptation options to increase farmers’ resilience and profits at the farm level. The prioritization of adaptation options was based on financial indicators considering numerous uncertain parameters affecting the agricultural sector. The results for phase 2 are made available in an online application accessible to all banks and project stakeholders.

Solutions deployed:

• r/aware – climate hazard analysis
• r/rating – crop and livestock value chain analysis
• r/invest – prioritization of adaptation options
• online application – for data access and recommendations visualization

Status:

Phase 1 (closed, approved by GCF), phase 2 (on-going).

Amount raised:

USD 172 million (for phase 1)