Mafeteng

Mohale's Hoek

Maseru

Quthing

Botha-Bothe

Qacha's Nek

Leribe

Mokhotlong

Berea

Thaba-Tseka

Lesotho

21,000 hectares of forested areas by 2020

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Eastern and Southern Africa are highly vulnerable to climate change, facing recurrent droughts, floods, heatwaves, and increasingly erratic rainfall that intensify water stress and land degradation. These climate stresses are compounded by rapid population growth, projected to rise from around 749 million in 2023 to nearly 964 million by 2050, placing growing pressure on already overstretched infrastructure. In 2023, around 365 million people lacked access to electricity and 580 million lacked access to clean cooking, severely constraining adaptation, productivity, and health outcomes across the region.

The ASCENT-GREEN project  aims to support climate-vulnerable communities across 21 countries in Eastern and Southern Africa by catalysing private-sector delivery of distributed renewable energy, clean cooking, and productive-use energy. It seeks to increase climate resilience, drive economic development, and reduce emissions across some of the region's most remote and fragile contexts.

Structured around three components, the project will establish a regional energy access financing facility providing affordable lending, results-based financing, and technical assistance, prioritizing rural households, fragile, conflict-affected populations, small and medium-sized enterprises and women-owned enterprises; develop regional de-risking facilities including a risk-sharing facility and a carbon risk mitigation facility to crowd in private capital; and establish a Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA)-led regional platform to coordinate policy, technical assistance, and knowledge sharing across participating countries.

Through financing instruments that address barriers such as affordability, risk perception, and scaling up, the project will mobilise significantly larger private flows and accelerate market transformations, enabling far greater reach. It is expected to directly benefit 28.8 million people and indirectly reach a further 13.8 million, supporting improved access to energy services and enhanced resilience across participating countries.

To support twenty-five (25) developing countries in the preparation and submission of BTRs and combined BTR/National Communications (BTR/NCs) in a gender-responsive manner that aligns with the reporting requirements of the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement (PA), while also addressing each country's unique national development priorities.

<p>The project’s main goal is to enhance the adaptive capacity of vulnerable and food insecure households and communities to the impacts of climate change on food security. This will be achieved by pursuing the following three objectives:I. Strengthening institutional capacity and building systems to generate climate information and reduce climate risks through more accurate sub-seasonal to seasonal forecasting and impact-based forecasting that enables scaled out anticipatory action and enhanced gender-responsive last mile climate services;II. Deepening gender-responsive awareness raising and communication on climate change impacts and adaptation actions, centred on the climate change – food security – gender – nutrition nexus, through an iterative and systematic process targeting vulnerable communities, women, youth, scholars, teachers, and nonformal educational institutions; andIII. Scaling up and out local adaptation actions for robust asset creation, income diversification, entrepreneurial development and stronger market linkages, enabled by a community-based planning process, for increased adaptive capacity and household resilience.</p>
<p>The project will meet these objectives through three interlinked components that build on achievements and integrate lessons learned from IACoV phase I, as detailed in Part II.A, to deliver an integrated package of interventions to address the key causes of vulnerability to climate change and food insecurity for vulnerable smallholder farmers and associated groups in selected districts in Lesotho.</p>

Local CSOs and CBOs in landscapes-seascapes around the world access grant financing and technical assistance, including capacity development and knowledge sharing to maintain and enhance their socio-ecological resilience, well-being and socio-economic conditions for global environmental benefits.

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