Disentangling The Needs & Challenges Behind Financing African's Urban Climate Adaptation & Resilient Growth

​Africa’s cities face significant adaptation and resilience challenges such as extreme heat, flooding events, and excessive precipitation further compounded by rapid urbanisation, growing informal settlement populations and inadequate infrastructure. These natural catastrophes are already causing significant losses and damages with MunichRe estimating them to total USD32.2bn in Africa between 2019-23. Yet adaptation finance remains scarce on the continent. CPI estimates Africa’s annual adaptation needs at USD70bn, with only USD13.8bn currently being received and only 5% of this coming from the private sector.

​Through this workshop, hosted in partnership with GSMA, we seek to define paths for innovative projects to mobilise finance into climate adaptation and opportunities for collaboration across economic actors in this space. Objectives of this event will include:

• ​Showcase examples of innovative SGBs and infrastructure projects that are directly address climate resilience in urban areas.

• ​Exploring the key challenges in increasing investment in climate resilience in African states and urban environments/cities including specific financing needs of the solutions showcased.

• ​Outlining innovative financing solutions that could enable scale up and replication of resilience solutions; by highlighting partnerships, transactions and financing structures that FSD Africa and workshop participants are supporting that are purpose-built for high-impact adaptation projects.

• ​To provide a clear call for an array of financial sector actors to more deliberately allocate capital towards adaptive and resilient projects and instruments in Africa.

• ​To enable participants to consider their role within the broader ecosystem and build partnerships that share adaptation financing learnings across locations and sectors.

• ​Identify practical opportunities for collaboration piloting new financing solutions specifically tailored for Urban resilience solutions.