A young pastoralist girl waits in the queue to water livestock. Photo credit: Christian Aid
Lessons learned from Grassroot Activists and Funders
Social movements and grassroot activists are calling on funders across the globe to step up to protect the lives and rights of those most affected by the climate crisis. They say investing in people at the front lines of this global crisis should take the form of climate financing as well as technical investments by funders and larger government entities.
In July, CJRF hosted two climate finance webinars to share lessons from grantee partner and funder experiences. The first event was a discussion among CJRF grantee partners on finance challenges and opportunities. Building on the first, the second discussion included grantee partners, the CJRF Council of Advisors, and other peer funders within CJRF’s network. Both sessions provided space for sharing stories, examples of what has and has not been working well, and thoughts on actionable priorities for advancing finance in the future.
Decentralizing funding to better reach grassroots groups
Nicholas Abuya, a resilience program officer at Christian Aid, described his experience designing an innovative decentralized climate finance model, working through a consortium composed of government agencies in Kenya. Under the model, county governments create regulations that include communities in planning and prioritization of climate adaptation initiatives. Abuya says this was an effort to decentralize financing so that funds could better reach grassroot communities. The model gave county governments and their citizens a means of accessing and using climate finance in a way that addresses their distinct adaptation priorities.
“Whenever we worked with the national government, we found that climate finance hardly trickled down to local communities,” Abuya said. “We wanted a system that could facilitate climate finance to more predictably flow to affected communities.”
The model strengthens existing legal, financial and fiduciary frameworks and standards to access climate finance on a regular and sustained basis from the national climate change fund, accredited National Implementing Entities (NIE) of the Green Climate Fund (GCF), the private sector and other sources.
In the pilot project for this approach, community members have been at the heart of both funding decisions and project design. This effort has captured the attention of other community-based organizations and they reached out to learn how it was implemented. Now, they are scaling this model to more counties in Kenya.
Beyond financial support
Much of the event’s discussion centered on how to get funding to communities directly impacted by climate change, but Abuya also mentioned how important it is that governments invest in the right elements to build capacity and technical support.
This sentiment was echoed by the former chair of the Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI), Sheela Patel. Speaking to funders, Patel said that while money is initially beneficial, other technical contributions can also empower communities and scale solutions.
“Global institutions can’t perpetually give money to do projects, but you can contribute by introducing us to new systems of technology, showing us new ways of managing projects, and by collaborating with us to ensure that the spend reaches where it should,” Patel said.
Learning from failure
Patel also described SDI’s efforts to create the Urban Poor Fund International (UPFI). The Fund ensures poor people are the central actors in urban development and poverty eradication, funding community-led projects such as community latrines, resettlement efforts, and housing development. She offered three concrete lessons from UPFI’s experience.
First, to learn how to do this work, start with small, risk-friendly amounts of money to many people, understanding that, as with the world of tech start-ups, failure is normal, and can be helpful. Climate finance needs to offer poor people “the right to fail,” said Patel.
Second and related, donors must learn to embrace failure so that they can understand the political and social obstacles that prevent poor people from managing money.
Finally, viewing the many different needs of poor people from a climate perspective gives a holistic picture of where investments should be made. It also allows for greater participation from those often left out of the climate conversation, such as poor people and women.
The UPFI’s approach to learning and failure proved effective in inspiring other organizations. The UK Department for International Development’s Community Led Infrastructure Finance Facility (CLIFF)* offered affordable finance for low-income housing and infrastructure projects in the Global South through long-term partnerships with NGOs. CLIFF’s premise was that the urban poor are worthy of investment. Patel says CLIFF was designed based on the Urban Poor Fund, to help provide money for the next level of financing that was needed.
Equity in financing requires dedication
The panel also shared lessons from funders on improving finance for grassroots groups. Louise Olivier of the Open Society Foundations described experiences from Open Society’s work in Jamaica and South Africa, where three aspects of their approach proved key to finding the right partners on the ground: 1) hiring staff from the countries funders seek to impact, 2) collaborating with other funders to jointly fund effective local groups, and 3) belonging to funder networks that can learn together and make the right connections.
Above all, Olivier said funders must be prepared to work harder to ensure equity.
“It’s a lot easier to find more established organizations than those that are less known. With those that are more established, it’s easier to initiate conversations, get a quick proposal, and see how their work aligns with your strategy,” Olivier said. “It’s incumbent upon us to do more work to ensure our funding in the climate finance space is spread more broadly.”
Policy barriers can impede efforts despite political will and adequate resources
Public funders also run into barriers to effectively dispersing resources to communities. The Asian Development Bank’s Arghya Sinha Roy shared an example where the Bank set out to finance a $200 million dollar project to support local communities in one of its member countries to strengthen resilience. But the country had no policy in place that gave dedicated attention to community-led resilience work, nor was there a mechanism to get climate finance to that level.
“When you are talking about this amount of money, fiduciary standards have to be in place to ensure that money is reaching down to the purpose that it is meant for,” Arghya said.
The Bank team and its partners solved the core challenge by working with the government and civil society organization to help develop a national framework on community resilience and by revisiting the design of an existing national development program from climate resilience angle. Because that program already allowed finances to reach communities, they were able to create a resilience-focused project that could fund measures at the household and community level. It wasn’t well-suited to address watershed connections among communities or ecosystem-specific risks, though, since budgets and legislation aren’t made along ecosystem boundaries. This shows the importance of having appropriate financing mechanisms at different levels and that could complement each other – a lesson for Arghya.
“The issue is to have the right systems in place so that the policy environment is available, the institution architecture is in place, and most importantly, ensuring that the money also accompanies strengthening capacity of local institutions to work collectively with local communities to identify the best solutions according to the local risk landscape.”
Actions for the future of climate finance
Following the panel discussion, participants had a chance to speak with the panelists in smaller break-out groups, then returned to plenary to reflect. Participants each shared one thing in the chat that they were motivated to do as a result of what they learned at these events. For example:
“Push for narrative changes on risk and impact with donors.”
“Support at least one social movement.”
“Share as many positive finance stories and models as possible.”
“Develop a compendium of justice-based grant making practices for funders, informed by CJRF partners.”
“Reflect on my organization’s understanding of risk and what is considered “‘risk taking.’”
“Identify and amplify the groundswell of evidence on how local initiatives deliver when adequately funded.”
“Facilitate the very capable global south voices to have a stronger global platform on climate finance.”
“Create, participate in, and attend more exchanges on role of Indigenous-led funds in advancing locally led initiatives and enhance the understanding of donors on Indigenous Peoples’ issues.”
We look forward to continuing these conversations and working with our grantee partners, peer funders, and social justice activists to advocate for climate financing that ensures people can build resilience and thrive in a changing climate.
*These services are now provided by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office.