This paper draws on five years of real-life experiments with the concept of country platforms in different jurisdictions on the African continent. It aims to capture lessons from these experiments and engagements with a variety of practitioners, state officials, academics, civil society leaders and others on the theory and practice of country platforms in the context of the climate and development nexus agenda. In early 2020, the African Climate Foundation (ACF) started drawing lessons from the South African Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) and in 2023 began to pivot the bulk of its strategy and programme of work towards supporting the creation of investment platform tools to unlock investment capital as part of the scaling of climate solutions for both mitigation and adaptation.
