Bringing climate finance to the local level: Mali's climate fund decentralisation

The Near East Foundation (NEF-Mali) and its partners, the Innovation, Environment and Development in Africa (IED-A) and the International Institute for Environment and Development UK (IIED-UK) initiated the Decentralising Climate Funds (DCF) programme in Mali and Senegal in 2015. It seeks to support adaptation initiatives led by communities and local authorities. In this sense, it aims to strengthen the resilience of communities, particularly women and young people, by enabling them to prioritise investments in public goods that deliver a high socio-economic impact. These investments are identified and prioritised by the communities themselves against a devolved climate finance budget managed by local governments. The vision of the DCF project is to build an inclusive and sustainable local financing mechanism that encourages decentralised allocation of climate funds to improve the resilience of populations. The project is funded by the Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters (BRACED) programme, an initiative of the Department for International Development (DFID) in the United Kingdom. The DCF project has operated in the administrative subdivisions of Koro,
Douentza and Mopti in the Mopti region of Mali for 4.5 years.

The project uses an integrated approach to building local resilience designed and led by communities and decentralised administrations. The objectives of this approach are to:
(i) define people's resilience priorities through inclusive and participatory planning processes;
(ii) enable local communities and local authorities to assess and improve their institutional capacities to define, implement and manage longer-term climate change adaptation programmes and local climate adaptation funds;
(iii) implement and monitor community-led investments that strengthen people's capacities to adapt to climate change;
(iv) develop a funding mechanism to enable the flow of climate finance from the national to the local level managed by local Governments

The DCF project is a good practice because it places local actors at the heart of the adaptation management and financing process and seeks to improve national decentralisation policies in order to make them more sensitive to climate change. It is technically feasible (i.e. easy to implement), and replicable across other contexts.