E Co. bites: What do I wish I saw more of in projects?

1 June 2020, Category: All insights, E Co. bites

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: Ben Bartle

Question: What do I wish I saw more of in projects?

Well, for me personally, it’s all about stakeholder consultation and engagement. If you do it right, you see the project design process fall into place more efficiently and effectively. You can see from projects which have actually failed – a common factor in many situations where projects fail to achieve their intended outcomes, impacts and ultimately, stakeholder benefits, is that the stakeholder consultation and coordination could’ve been done better and this would have avoided a lot of project issues that subsequently emerged.

Whenever I’m on the ground and doing stakeholder consultation, I always allow the meetings and the networking with people to snowball. Someone will mention someone else to speak to, and I always make sure I’ll make time to speak to that person. Just to ensure that all the aspects and influencers of the project are covered and that all of the stakeholder concerns are covered too.

Often when we talk about climate finance projects, we think about the social, enviornmental and economic factors that are of primary concern. One thing I’d like to see more of in projects is capacity development of the local banks and financial insitutions to build a suite of financial mechanisms; for microfinance institutions to unlock lending potential for microenterprises assisting SMEs for instance. If you build the capacity of those institutions, financial assitance is more readily available to project developers when funding from the GCF or GEF comes to an end, and that ensures the sustainability of a project.

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