The Somalia GCF Readiness Project- GWPEA meets with Ministry of Environment and Climate Change-Somalia

GWPEA met with H. E. Minister Khadija Mohamed Almakhzoumi, of Somalia’s newly established Ministry of Environment & Climate Change (MoECC) to introduce the 2021 Somalia Green Climate Fund (GCF) Readiness Project to her.

GWP serves as Delivery Partner to the Government of Somalia for the project. The recent transition of Somalia’s Directorate of Environment and Climate Change to a fully-fledged Ministry signifies the importance the new government places on addressing impacts of climate change.

Somalia is in the midst of enduring a series of droughts, made more frequent and more severe by climate change. The current drought is the worst one yet in 40 years, and a famine looms in the horizon.

The GCF is the largest fund in the world dedicated solely to fund interventions that reduce carbon emissions and help people, economies, and the environment adapt to climate change impacts. Somalia’s MoECC is the country’s focal point or National Designated Authority (NDA) for the fund in the country. The NDA provides broad strategic oversight of the GCF’s activities in Somalia, including facilitating stakeholders in the country to prioritize and prepare investments to be financed by the GCF. 

The major outputs of the project include:

-the Inter-Ministerial Technical Steering Committee for the coordination of climate action in the country,

- the climate finance policy that provides a legal and institutional framework to guide coordination of climate finance flows,

- the country-programme that defines investments priorities to build climate resilience

- and the preparation of 2 high quality concept notes to support Somalia access to GCF funds

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Countries can access up to USD 1M every year from the GCF, to strengthen its ‘readiness’ to access and utilize climate finance. GWP is accredited as a Delivery Partner to the GCF to support countries to access and implement GCF Readiness support. Important to the new Ministry’s agenda is strategic use of climate finance available to the country. The NDA and GWPEA discussed furthering the current partnership via continued support on strengthening Somalia’s GCF Readiness in the coming years. 

The USD 670,000 2021 Somalia GCF Readiness focuses on strengthening the NDA to deliver on its mandate, build institutional and technical capacity for project prioritization and preparation in the country, and develop a pipeline of Somali projects for the GCF