Improving Proposal Writing Skills to Access Climate Finance
Today in the conference room at the Ministry of Sustainable Development, Climate Change and Disaster Risk Management, public and private sector stakeholders, including representatives from non-government organizations, and other associations gathered for a climate change write shop. The two-day session, which commenced today, is the first of three. But what is a write shop? Basically, they are learning about how to write proposals to access climate financing available through multiple facilities. News Five’s Duane Moody reports on day-one of the capacity building exercise.
Lennox Gladden
Dr. Lennox Gladden, Chief Climate Change Officer, N.C.C.O.
“There is the NAMA facility that deals with mitigation, there is the adaptation fund, there is the GCF, the Green Climate Fund, there is also the Global Environment Fund. These are some of the larger ones that we are familiar with. There is also the NDC Partnership. They have a special fund to help countries work on some of the technical aspects. There is the ICAT, which is the Initiative for Climate Action and Transparency. They are supporting us as well. The World Bank Group, they have facilities that have that special thematic area that focuses on climate change. And recently for blue carbon, there was a call for proposal from Loreal.”
Duane Moody, Reporting
Chief Climate Change Officer, Doctor Lennox Gladden is sharing a list of the many facilities that continuously provide funding for projects with climate change components attached to them. Many are not aware of these existing facilities and then there are those who are, but don’t know where to start in terms of writing a proposal for climate funding. In the next two days, participants will learn more about climate proofing their proposals.
Dr. Lennox Gladden
“As it relates to the capacity of some of our stakeholders, they are sometimes use to writing some of these conventional project proposals and in the absence of climate proofing their proposal, there is high chance that it will take a lot of feedback from whosoever is donating the funds for these proposals. So that is a challenge, so hopefully they learn how to climate proof their projects through this process. At the end of this three-part session, we want for them to be competent and confident in proposal formulation, especially a proposal which has this high climate change component because the reality is right now most facilities this is what they are looking for.”
For almost all proposals, Doctor Gladden says that these climate funding agencies look beyond the environment and want to support projects that also focus on socio-economic issues and people.
Dr. Lennox Gladden
“To have a truly comprehensive or a bankable project proposal, for some of the entities, some of the facilities that are going to invest substantial amount of funds, you cannot only factor the environmental component of it. Even in the proposal itself, you have to say what is going to be some of the impact to communities, the feasibility of investing. These are some of the things that they have to factor, looking at things from a comprehensive perspective and also you need to align with some of the strategies that we have, some of our national strategies. We spoke about the low emissions development strategy, we recently updated out climate change policy and of course the national determined contributions. Some of the donors, you go to them and that’s the first question they ask.”
So it is about building the capacity of the participating stakeholders and the GEF Small Grants Program, which is implemented by UNDP and executed by UNOPS, provides support funding to build the capacity of organizations wanting to improve their proposal writing to access climate finance. These include youth groups, associations and more.
Josue Oliva
Josue Oliva, Program Assistant, GEF Small Grants Program
“We are an environmental program that supports livelihood type of projects. We try to have projects that are coming in be involved with the communities. We are not specifically looking at persons applying but mostly from a non-governmental organization; civil society organization and we are talking about women’s groups, youth groups, cooperatives, associations. The communities have seen in first hand so they know what they are dealing with, but the problem that we have been facing is that they do not have the technical capacity. Or maybe they don’t have the actual people to help them write the proposals in a way that the donor understands and the donor would be able to fund. Within the GEF Small Grants Program, we are a donor organization that provides financing and technical capacities for that. So we are one of the risk takers, organizations, donors in Belize that would go in those communities, to those organizations that have never got a grant.”
The idea is to have a portfolio of projects so that whenever there is a call for a proposal, there are proposals already available that can be submitted. Duane Moody for News Five.
