Watch our bite-sized and easily digestible video series, sharing our insights and experiences of designing low-carbon, climate-resilient development projects, across the globe. We discuss the who, where, what, why and hows behind successfully obtaining funding from major donors, including the Green Climate Fund (GCF) and Global Environment Facility (GEF).
Transcript
Speaker: Morna Isaac
Question: What is the process of getting a GCF project approved like?
Green Climate Fund or GCF projects are relatively big for development projects. While the GCF have approved a few projects with a total size of around 10 million dollars, most projects are in the tens of millions and some much bigger. This is one of the reasons that the Fund only approves a limited number of projects. One result of this is that they pay a lot of attention to each project.
Proposals that are being considered for approval are not just one more in a long list. Each one is important. This means that organisations submitting projects to the GCF for approval can expect intense scrutiny at all stages. The Fund will look for every part of the project to be thoroughly justified and may suggest changes to the project designed to bring it more into line with what they are looking for in funded projects.
For instance, in projects I’ve worked on, suggestions have included taking a component of the proposed project and turning it into a separate project and splitting a project that included a lot of capacity building into two phases. On the other hand, there have also been very detailed questions about the project budget.