Africa Climate Change Fund

The ACCF was established by the African Development Bank in April 2014 with an initial contribution of € 4.725 million from the Government of Germany to support African countries, to build their resilience to the negative impacts of climate change and in transitioning to sustainable low-carbon growth. The ACCF was able to secure an additional funding commitment of € 4.7 million from the Government of Italy at the end of 2015 and a commitment of € 2 million from the Government of Flanders, Belgium in 2016, which brought the total contributions to the ACCF since its inception to over € 11.4 million. These commitments allowed the ACCF to scale-up to a multi-donor trust fund.

Additionally, in 2020 the Fund successfully mobilized additional resources of about $9.274 million from the Government of Flanders (€2.256 million) and from two new donors, Global Affairs Canada (CAD 7 million) and Government of Quebec (CAD 2 million). These additional resources will continue to support African countries to scale up climate finance readiness activities to access more resources from climate funds to implement their climate actions.

To date, the ACCF has approved 15 small grant projects for a total of about USD 8 million. The approved projects are supporting over 16 African countries (i.e. Benin, Cabo Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Eswatini, Lesotho, Kenya, Mali, Mozambique, Namibia, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, Swaziland, Sudan, Uganda, and Zanzibar (Tanzania)), via individual country and multinational projects to strengthen their capacities to access international climate finance, and implement small-scale adaptation projects to enhance their resilience.

The Call For Proposals

The Third Call for Proposals (CFP3) of the Africa Climate Change Fund (ACCF) focuses on Gender Equality and Climate Resilience (GECR). Thus, the Fund is seeking innovative and impactful gender transformative proposals that are focused on:

Addressing unequal access of women and men to the resources that are needed to adapt to climate change and mitigate GHG emissions, and to adequately and proportionally address the ways in which gender roles influence the ability of women and men to adapt to climate change and mitigate GHG emissions; and
Supporting African countries to transition to gender transformative climate resilient, low carbon development, and scale-up access to climate finance.

The CFP3 adopts a Gender Transformative Approach to engage men and women together as agents of change to tackle the root causes of gender inequalities, unequal power balance and vulnerability, and contribute to a transition toward more inclusive, equitable, sustainable, and climate resilient development.

Grant size and funding envelope

The financial envelope available for this call is US$6 million in grants, and the Fund is seeking for projects and programmes in the range of US$250,000 to US$1,000,000 per project.

Eligible Recipients

This call for proposals is open to all eligible recipients of ACCF grants, including African governments, regional organizations, African funds, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and research institutions, as well as departments of the African Development Bank (AfDB or Bank). The Bank’s departments may submit proposals directly or may work with eligible external recipients to help them prepare high-quality proposals. Proposals from consortia are allowed, provided that all consortium members are eligible beneficiaries.

Eligible activities

ACCF grants can be used to support the following activities, among others: consultancy or expert fees, development of project proposals, design and development of the theory of change, logical framework, monitoring and evaluation system and learning plan, trainings, workshops, consultations and participation in regional and international meetings, communications, awareness-raising, advocacy, translation services, office equipment and transport costs, and certain administrative costs and fees.