Saliem Fakir – executive director of the African Climate Foundation (ACF) – discusses a positive shift in the ACF’s strategy, which focuses on more concrete outcomes that impact the real economy. He notes that the ACF have concentrated much of its work around selected country investment platforms. 

What has been the recent shift in the ACF’s strategy, particularly regarding the focus on country investment platforms?

There’s been a positive shift in the African Climate Foundation’s (ACF) strategy, even though our thematic areas remain the same. The approach taken by the ACF is to focus on more concrete outcomes that impact the real economy. As such, we have concentrated much of our work around selected country investment platforms.

When we think of country platforms it tends to suggest activities only at a national level. However, our new strategy aims to scale investments and initiatives, providing an implementation framework to guide our support in different countries through our investment in our grantees, which are part of our ecosystem.

The idea of investment platforms is about coordinating political alignment, policy reform and addressing issues that need scaling up. These efforts not only meet private objectives but also address the country’s needs for development and investment.

Our role is to support the coordination of those processes through technical assistance and the creation of new institutions. We define realistic investment packages that are attractive enough to initiate and sustain these initiatives.

How different is this from your previous approach?

Our end goal must be about increasing the capacity to change the real economy; otherwise, nothing will move, and it will be all talk. To our grantees, we want to suggest that their concepts and requests to the ACF must be about shifting the ground – meaning let’s find ways to increase public and private spending in real economy outcomes. We believe in activism, advocacy, and campaigns but not for their own sake. They need to be part of a long-term strategy. The ACF is moving away from funding policy research, campaigns, and events that are not designed to unlock public and private investments in new climate technology, production systems, and mitigation risks from climate vulnerability. We do not want to know what the problem is but how to solve it.

Why investment platforms – what’s the added value?

Most traditional climate philanthropies focus heavily on policy advocacy, research and campaigns. Our motto is not just to voice solutions but to explore how to realise them. This approach is more challenging and requires a different mindset and a higher appetite for risk due to uncertainties about success. However, we believe philanthropy should play this role.  Advocacy alone is insufficient; we move from advocacy to action on the ground. Investment platforms allow us to take this crucial step, involving the right partners from various fields, not just climate experts.

We find that investment platforms are an exciting way to build our grantee ecosystem and investments. We draw on lessons from South Africa and other regions, which we believe are more likely to gain traction in Africa. The investment gap is wide, and it’s essential to unblock opportunities and hold advanced economies to their climate obligations.  Creating demand for financial resources and having the capacity to absorb these funds into real projects is vital. These investments must have tangible benefits for countries, including improving growth, reducing debt, supporting economic diversification, and building resilient economies.

For us, the investment platform is a paradigm involving various approaches at the country level, sub-regional level, and even sector or technology-specific levels.

Can you provide an example?

An example would be our work in Nigeria with the Sovereign Investment Authority to set up a renewable investment platform. We commissioned the technical work to design this platform, established the framework and operational model, and ensured the platform was credible, bankable and aimed at an investment cap of half a billion USD.

Another example is our recently launched Adaptation and Resilience Investment Platform (ARIP) in Malawi. Of course, this is only just taking off. In the future, for example, if a country needs the development of an industrial hub for electric vehicles or something of that sort, the ACF should be able to support the technical work for that.

Which African countries has the ACF selected to support in 2024/5 through the investment platform?

The investment platform will create real-life capability around assembling investment packages.  We are currently focusing on South Africa, with some investments in Namibia, Senegal and Nigeria. Additionally, we are scoping Kenya, Malawi, Zambia, the DRC, and regions such as Morocco and Ethiopia. However, no concrete decisions have been made regarding the nature of our engagement and investments in these countries.

We believe this approach will be a game-changer and address real economic issues. It requires a different set of skills beyond advocacy, research and policy work, focusing on creating momentum behind investment concepts that need technical expertise. For example, we are looking to launch the Africa Energy Futures Hub with the Rockefeller Foundation and Energy for All. These initiatives recognise the need for energy planning and modelling capabilities within Africa, particularly amongst the universities and other stakeholders, to fill capacity gaps. Linking these capabilities to investment platforms makes them more concrete, adding value to our work in Africa and ensuring that our other initiatives are more relevant to the real economy.

Is the ACF abandoning activism, grassroots mobilisation, and community-based solutions?

No, to the contrary. In fact, all our investment platform ideas are infused with a social justice dimension. Often, paths towards new climate investments cannot happen without activism and advocacy in some places. We are focused on the change we want and the type of multi-layered ecosystem we need to invest in to make this happen. For example, we are keen on local community and farmer-based solutions because, in some countries, they will be the main drivers of change. We are, for example, looking into a regenerative agriculture fund to improve financial inclusion for small farmers. We just believe that the investment platform focus enables us to be more conscious of being concrete, but it does not exclude building advocacy and activism within an ecosystem of actors or a network of actors that want to bring a shift in the status quo.

What are the chances of this succeeding?

I don’t know – nobody knows, but we must try something different. The conventional approach of philanthropy, what is called the outside track, is either insufficient or does not always work. Our political skills in philanthropy must be sharpened on understanding the value of strategy to deliver impact and how to apply different tactics to achieve strategic objectives. Change is a constant moving target. The model in Africa must be different. We must be guided by context, not templates pushed from outside of the continent. I think some people would call mimicking the US or European approach to solving climate issues in a blind and pedantic manner rightfully as “philanthropic colonialism”. The ACF’s legitimacy derives from being embedded in the continent. We are very cautious in how we work on the continent. Africa is not a country, but a continent with 54 states; it is diverse and rich, so a “same-same” for each country is totally absurd as a model. Absurdity should stay offshore where it belongs – it is patronising and takes agency away from Africans.

The ACF is updating it’s website. More information on our strategy and approach will be available soon.