Africa Adaptation Acceleration Program

The Africa Adaptation Acceleration Program (AAAP) is a joint initiative of the African Development Bank and the Global Center on Adaptation (GCA). It aims to mobilize $25 billion, over five years, to accelerate and scale climate adaptation action across the continent.

The AAAP was endorsed at the Leaders' Dialogue on the Africa Covid-Climate Emergency in April 2021. This was the largest gathering ever of African Heads of State and Government solely focused on adaptation.

In Glasgow, the Africa Adaptation Acceleration Summit, held as part of the COP26 World Leaders Summit, was hosted by President Felix-Antoine Tshisekedi of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Several global leaders made commitments to support adaptation in Africa, including through the AAAP. The UK Government announced an important commitment of £20 million to support the upstream work of the AAAP.

No other adaptation initiative has achieved this level of consensus on the continent.

The AAAP works on the following four bold interconnected initiatives/pillars to achieve transformational results by 2025:

• The Climate-Smart Digital Technologies for Agriculture and Food Security Pillar has a goal to scale up access to climate-smart digital technologies, and associated data-driven agricultural and financial services for at least 30 million farmers in Africa. It will support food security in 26 African countries, more efficient landscape restoration efforts, and ultimately increase productivity by between 40% and 70%.
• The African Infrastructure Resilience Accelerator Pillar aims to scale up new technologies, designs, and nature-based solutions to adapt urban and rural infrastructure to Africa's current and future climate. Targeted interventions will make investments in key sectors such as water, transport, energy, and waste management ready for the climate disasters of today and tomorrow. The AAAP aims to influence the annual $93 billion of infrastructure funding so that 50% is specifically targeted to enhance the climate resilience of economies and communities, and to climate-proof projects.
• The Youth Empowerment for Entrepreneurship and Job Creation in Climate Adaptation and Resilience Pillar has the goal of developing the skills of 1 million African youth (aged 18-35) to prepare them for green jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities. This program will also unlock $500 million in credit for adaptation action from innovative youth-led enterprises (of which 50% will be women-led) to address climate challenges faced by vulnerable communities in Africa.
• The Innovative Financial Initiatives for Africa Pillar aims to make substantive headway towards closing the adaptation finance gap. Africa receives less than 4% of global climate finance due to an inability to access existing international funds. A technical assistance program is building countries’ capacity for adaptation finance planning and decision making, strengthening direct access to funds, and promoting inter-sectoral, large-scale, and transformational adaptation and resilience projects and programs. In the initial phase, the technical assistance program will support public and private sector entities in at least 20 African countries to mobilize more than $3 billion in new concessional finance. In addition, this AAAP pillar will support the design of innovative public and private financial instruments, ranging from resilience bonds and debt-for-resilience swaps to aggregation mechanisms for adaptation investment assets and monetization of adaptation benefits. This pillar works with others to mobilize the required resources to implement the AAAP.

The AAAP will be implemented through two mechanisms:

First, an AAAP Upstream Financing Facility, housed at the Global Center on Adaptation, to support the evidence-based knowledge, project design and preparation, and policy work needed for the success of AAAP operations. The AAAP Upstream Facility provides resources to strengthen adaptation and resilience components into multilateral development bank projects in the pipeline.

Second, the African Development Fund (ADF) Climate Action Window. To support Africa’s low-income countries, the African Development Fund (ADF) – the concessional lending arm of the African Development Bank Group – has introduced a Climate Action Window of up to $13 billion for the ADF 16 replenishment.

The need for this is very pertinent: 9 of the 10 most vulnerable countries to climate change in the world are in sub-Saharan Africa and all of them depend on resources of the ADF. These countries cannot access the global climate financing institutions and receive just 2% of global climate finance. The ADF Climate Action Window will support climate adaptation at scale: provide 20 million farmers with access to climate-smart agricultural technologies; support 20 million farmers and pastoralists with weather-indexed insurance; revamp 1 million hectares of degraded lands; provide 18 million people with water; and provide 814 million cubic meters of water storage.

The COP26 Glasgow Climate Pact represents a breakthrough moment for adaptation with the pledge of doubling global climate adaptation finance by 2025. Amid mounting evidence of climate devastation globally, however, COP27 presents another serious new test for global climate cooperation, and it must deliver. COP27 must bring the international community together to work together and to effectively advance the common cause of accelerated adaptation for Africa.

The Africa Adaptation Acceleration Program (AAAP) is contributing to closing Africa’s adaptation gap by supporting African countries to make a transformational shift in their development pathways by putting climate adaptation and resilience at the center of their policies, programs, and institutions

Learn more about AAAP:

AAAP Implementation AAAP Q & A AAAP at COP27

Concept Note and Programme Profiles of the 2021 YouthADAPT Winners Q & A with the Winners

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