THE AFRICAN CLIMATE FOUNDATION
The ACF is the first African led strategic climate change grant-making foundation on the continent. Building on the success of partner organisations like the European Climate Foundation and ClimateWorks Foundation, the ACF was established to provide a mechanism through which philanthropies can contribute to Africa’s efforts to address climate change. As an African-led and African-based foundation, we are committed to supporting African solutions to the climate change challenges facing the continent.
WHAT WE DO
Working with philanthropies
We work closely with philanthropic organizations to identify strategic opportunities to support adaptation, resilience and mitigation initiatives on the continent and to unlock new opportunities for sustainable development in Africa.
Partnering with African organizations
We partner with Africa focused organisations working to address climate change and champion climate justice on the African continent. We provide a mechanism through which organisations can access new sources of funding and leverage others.
Supporting thought leadership
We support and develop networks to enable greater knowledge sharing. We are also creating a hub for thought leadership, leveraging existing expertise and knowledge on the continent to interrogate and spearhead new ideas on how to address climate change in Africa.
OUR APPROACH
The challenge that African countries face is how to simultaneously achieve their developmental objectives while adapting to and building resilience against climate change. While our work is primarily focused on climate change, we are also committed to supporting interventions that have the potential to unlock new avenues of development for African countries.
We recognize complexity
We believe that climate change issues cannot be explored or addressed in isolation but must be located within the broader developmental framework, as part of a bigger and more complex system.
We believe in collaboration
We work closely with a range of partners from civil society, academia, government, business, labour and funding organisations both within Africa and across the globe. We believe that co-creation is critical for ensuring that mitigation, adaptation and resilience initiatives are tailored to meet Africa’s specific needs.
We act on evidence
We are committed to drawing on and generating the most current, scientifically robust, and multi-disciplinary data and evidence available to inform our work.
OUR WORK
We work in sectors that are key to unlocking long-term inclusive growth and development in Africa and that help to grow adaptive capacity, build climate resilience and mitigate emission. We also work on interventions that traverse these sectors such as climate finance, digitisation, infrastructure, industrialisation, geopolitics and climate diplomacy. These, we believe, are key to delivering scale and impact. Finally, we recognise that inequality in all of its forms undermines people’s personal and collective ability to guard against climate change impacts, and that building climate resilience in Africa requires us to be alive to the intersectionality of people’s lived experiences. As such, we have identified numerous cross-cutting issues that informs all our work.
Energy Access and Transitions
Electricity and energy, more generally, is critical for driving development. However, sub-Saharan Africa remains the most electricity poor region in the world - despite its significant resources. Addressing Africa’s energy security, through the use of its renewable resources, provides countries with the opportunity to support their immediate development objectives, improve the lives of their people and create new economic opportunities in clean energy industries.
Resilient Urban Environments
Cities and towns throughout Africa are projected to be home to half of Africa’s population by 2050. At present, financial and capacity constraints are resulting in urban decay and sprawl in many of Africa’s cities. This is impacting the sustainability of these cities and inhabitants’ quality of life. Renewing urban landscapes in sustainable ways by, for example, deploying clean technology solutions, has the potential to unlock new economic opportunities, reduce existing infrastructure deficits and improve the conditions of citizens.
Sustainable Land-use and Agriculture
Certain landscapes, such as key water source areas, are critical for ensuring the resources necessary to sustain human existence and support development. Competition for land, deforestation and unsustainable economic activities (like coal mining) are threatening many of Africa’s key biodiversity areas and people’s livelihoods. Protecting these areas and supporting alternative economic opportunities, such as regenerative agriculture, can help to ensure the sustainability of these resources for Africa’s future. There are also potential avoided emissions co-benefits for African countries.
Resource Sectors, Value Chains and Infrastructure
To achieve its development objectives, Africa needs to address its infrastructure gap. Climate and other sources of finance could be used to support climate-resilient infrastructure deployment. Africa is also host to many of the mineral resources necessary for clean technologies. Ensuring that these resources are responsibly extracted is critical for Africa’s adaptive capacity. The strategic nature of these resources also provides countries with greater bargaining power, giving them more room to extract value through, for example, greater beneficiation. There are also many possibilities across the value chain in clean industries (such as renewable energy technologies) to drive value for African countries and support new types of manufacturing, industrial capabilities and allied services.
Climate Justice and Equity
Climate change reinforces, and exacerbates, existing inequalities. As a diverse continent with complex developmental and climate-related challenges, Africa is one the most vulnerable regions in the world to climate change, socially and economically. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the vulnerability of the world at large and the developing world in particular to the emergence of new forms of diseases. Many lessons can be drawn from the COVID-19 experience about how to build resilience (through, for example, improved infrastructure, access etc.) against future climate change-related health challenges.
Because climate change directly impacts people’s lives, the ACF works across the following cross-cutting themes: gender, human rights, health, education, youth and climate justice, ensuring social justice, inclusion and broad-based participation is at the core of our work.