Southern

City of Kigali

Eastern

Northern

Western

Rwanda

30% forest cover of national land area by 2020

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Rwanda Wildlife Conservation Bond implemented by International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD)

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.

Cocoa and coffee are climate-sensitive commodities cultivated by smallholder farmers across Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Ghana, Guatemala, Nigeria, Peru, Rwanda, and Uganda. They face increasing risks from climate variability, land degradation, and tightening regulatory requirements. Pre-harvest finance remains structurally underprovided, as commercial lenders rarely extend unsecured credit in rural emerging markets, while cooperatives and exporters lack the financial resources to support farmers year-round. Climate finance has typically prioritised large infrastructure programmes rather than value chain operations, leaving a persistent gap.

The FSF ACCT programme scales sustainability-linked working capital and technical assistance for enterprises operating in cocoa and coffee landscapes across the ten countries, building on a strategy tested through the Food Securities Fund (FSF). It provides short-term renewable working capital loans to midstream enterprises sourcing from smallholder farmers, paired with targeted technical assistance on climate-smart practices, traceability, and gender inclusion.

The programme is structured around two components: an investment facility providing working capital loans linked to annual environmental and social due diligence; and a technical assistance facility supporting borrowers across environmental, social, and business resilience themes. Demand-side actors, including large multinational agribusinesses, provide additional risk mitigation through guarantees at the sub-project level.

The programme was developed under GCF's Project-specific Assessment Approach (PSAA).

The project aims to support four countries–Ecuador, Maldives, Rwanda, and Uganda–to prepare and submit Biennial Transparency Reports (BTRs) and combined Biennial Transparency Report / National Communications (BTR/NCs) that will comply with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement (PA) reporting requirements, while responding to national development goals.

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