A three-day workshop in Lusaka invited a broad range of stakeholders to assess the results of the country’s Strategic Program for Climate Resilience – and draw lessons for future investments.
Since 2011, when Zambia’s Strategic Program for Climate Resilience was approved, CIF has invested US$91.43 million to enhance adaptive capacity at the local level, make key infrastructure more resilient, strengthen climate governance, and facilitate private investment in resilience-building.
The funds flowed through four projects co-financed by the World Bank and the African Development Bank (AfDB), starting in 2013, that together mobilized over $300 million, including funds from CIF’s Pilot Program for Climate Resilience, the two banks, the government, and other sources.
Now, with PPCR activities in Zambia wrapping up, CIF has piloted one more innovation there: a “close-out” mission to gather insights from a wide range of stakeholders about the results and impact achieved from the national to the local level, and draw lessons for future investments.
This “close-out” approach is the endline of a very unique results system put in place by the CIF more than a decade ago. The system utilizes a country ownership driven approach not commonly seen where countries convene a national multi-stakeholder scoring workshop on an annual basis to collate, aggregate, deliberate, validate the results.
What made a difference in this unique system is that it places people squarely at the center of the results measurement approach itself – and representatives from diverse stakeholder groups in each country are directly involved in participatory results reporting of the country’s resilience agenda and the program’s investment outcomes. In Zambia and in other CIF PPCR countries - they have customized this monitoring of results approach to their own institutional and national context. In practice, this approach has led to significant learning, knowledge-generation, and implementation feedback loops between the relevant actors on the Resilience Agenda in Zambia.
“This is all about the results,” said Sandra Romboli, who led the close-out workshop in Lusaka on 23–25 January. “We dove into what worked well and what could be better, we looked at the detailed results achieved and how well different groups were included. This approach also includes dimensions of gender, stakeholder engagement and social inclusion, as well as the extent to which we see lasting, systemic and transformational change. And we asked: Did we contribute to the transformation needed to tackle resilience and roof causes of vulnerability?”
The Lusaka mission, which will be replicated in other PPCR countries as their own investment plans are completed, was designed to capture an even broader range of perspectives and support deeper learning.
“It is important to take stock of the full impacts of our investments,” said Luis Tineo, interim CEO of CIF. “This new approach showcases CIF’s commitment to harvest robust results, which we see as essential to ensuring that the climate finance we deliver is truly effective. PPCR has a strong track record of catalyzing investment in climate resilience. Now we’ll also be able to gauge its success at improving governance, building capacities, and driving transformation.”
The Lusaka workshop brought together more than 50 people from the national government, district and ward level governments, civil society, the private sector, the World Bank, and the AfDB, as well as CIF staff. “We saw some major strides at the national level in terms of planning, new policies, and new regulations,” Romboli said. There was important evidence of horizontal integration – across sectors – that has enabled climate resilience measures to be taken up in a broad manner in Zambia. Partly through revised sector policies and regulations but also through the establishment of task teams/ steering committees to mainstream Climate Change / Resilience and reaching across eight sectors.
“We also saw important climate resilience tools that have been put in place and integrated vertically from the national level, and all the way down to the community level. We saw very important capacity building at the grassroots level, and significant climate-proofing of infrastructure.”
The final day of the workshop focused on synthesizing what was learned and on finding ways to sustain the benefits of the PPCR projects in the long term. In addition, CIF staff conducted a field visit to a PPCR project site and multiple interviews. Lessons and perspectives will be shared over the coming weeks and months, looking both at the close-out process, and at lessons for Zambia in particular.
The new insights will be put into practice right away. The Lusaka workshop is already informing the planning process for the Zambezi Regional Program under CIF’s new Nature, People, and Climate Investment Program (NPC). Zambia is also receiving support to prepare its own NPC investment plan.