IIED launches training webinar to help get climate finance to the local level

A video presentation providing an overview of IIED's Money Where it Matters (MWIM) framework

Getting climate finance to the local level where it can be invested in initiatives that communities own and support is the route that donors should follow and local institutions need to prepare themselves for, according to IIED researchers Sam Greene and Barry Smith.

In a new webinar-based training package, they provide an overview of how that can be achieved, describing the principles of IIED’s Money Where it Matters (MWIM) framework.

Divided into three sections, part one describes the climate finance landscape and some of its systemic challenges. It outlines the four-stage ‘journey’ that local institutions must take to become ready to manage climate finance, including the decisions they will have to make and the capabilities that will make them more eligible.

Part two expands on the building blocks to enable local institutions to deliver adaptation finance to local communities effectively, covering:

• The tactics for building trust between local communities and (usually) distant funders
• The need to aggregate smaller climate action initiatives to present a lower risk to funders
• The suggestions for building skills and competencies between organisations to run and report on activities, and
• The requirement to shift incentives to persuade funders and national and local government that they must be patient about seeing the return on their investment — that they must expect to be in it for the long term rather than seeing this kind of finance as a quick win.

Finally, part three sets out the 15 good practices to follow for accessing climate finance and for delivering it.

The training session includes presentations and group exercises, with a question-and-answer session at the end.

IIED has been working closely with two NGOs, ECOTrust and Adel Sofala (website in Portuguese), to explore their readiness to access climate finance at greater scales and staff from those organisations are road testing the MWIM principles.

The Money Where it Matters programme at IIED is working with local institutions to enable them to access climate finance and deliver it in line with the MWIM principles. That work includes developing new tools that will enable organisations to self-assess their climate-readiness and consider how they can articulate their impact effectively to others.

The online training was made possible thanks to the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Netherlands through IUCN National Committee of The Netherlands Foundation and WWF Netherlands.