East Africa’s climate finance pipeline faces bankability test
In an increasingly competitive global climate-finance market, bankability may ultimately determine which ambitions receive funding and which remain on paper.
Weak project preparation is emerging as one of the biggest barriers to converting East Africa’s growing climate finance commitments into investable projects, Uganda’s Finance Minister Henry Musasizi has warned.
For governments across the region, the challenge is no longer simply securing promises of climate finance. The harder task is developing projects sufficiently prepared to attract capital and deliver measurable economic and social returns.
Musasizi said too many potentially transformative projects enter financing discussions before critical fundamentals, including feasibility studies, environmental and social safeguards, land arrangements, revenue assumptions and implementation responsibilities—have been resolved.
“Too many promising ideas reach financing discussions before feasibility work, safeguards, land arrangements, revenue assumptions and implementation responsibilities are clear,” Musasizi said.
He was speaking while opening the 8th East African Region Climate Finance Directors Level Meeting at Lake Victoria Serena Hotel, Kigo, held under the theme, “From Commitments to Investment: Scaling Bankable Climate Finance for NDC 3.0 Implementation in East Africa.”
The message reflects a growing pressure on governments to move climate finance from policy commitments and conference pledges into a pipeline of projects that financiers can assess, price and fund.
From pledges to investable projects
Musasizi argued that climate finance must ultimately be judged by what it delivers on the ground, particularly for communities facing the greatest exposure to climate shocks.
“A commitment is valuable only when it translates to resources reaching the communities that need them,” he said.
For Uganda, the minister sees climate finance not as a standalone environmental funding stream but as part of the country’s broader economic transformation agenda.
He said climate action should form part of the investment foundation for Uganda’s Tenfold Growth Strategy, which seeks to expand the economy to approximately $500 billion by 2040.
The strategy’s priority areas—agro-industrialisation, tourism, mineral development, and science, technology and innovation, will depend heavily on infrastructure and natural systems capable of withstanding climate-related disruptions.
Reliable energy, resilient transport infrastructure, healthy ecosystems, productive land and a workforce protected from climate shocks are therefore becoming increasingly important to the country’s investment proposition.
“Climate action is therefore part of the investment foundation for sustained economic transformation,” Musasizi said.
Regional scale could unlock capital
Musasizi also made the case for East African countries to approach climate investment collectively, particularly through the East African Community (EAC).
He identified cross-border opportunities in clean energy and electricity-grid interconnection, resilient transport infrastructure, shared water basins, climate-smart agriculture and regional early-warning systems.
Such projects often require financing beyond the fiscal capacity of individual countries. Regional cooperation could allow governments to aggregate demand, share the cost of technical project preparation and package similar investments into larger programmes.
The objective is to create investment opportunities with sufficient scale and quality to attract institutional investors, development finance institutions and private capital.
Pooling projects could also reduce one of the persistent weaknesses in public investment, the high cost and technical complexity of preparing individual projects to financial close.
Building Uganda’s climate investment architecture
Uganda has already taken steps to strengthen the policy framework underpinning climate finance through its National Climate Finance Strategy and National Green Taxonomy.
Musasizi said the next challenge is implementation.
The frameworks must increasingly influence how projects are selected, incorporated into budgets, financed and monitored, rather than remaining policy documents with limited impact on investment decisions.
This shift would also require governments to become more precise about the lifecycle of climate finance.
Musasizi called for financing to be tracked through distinct stages, separating pledges from approvals, approvals from disbursements, and disbursements from results.
Such tracking, he argued, would give governments and development partners a clearer picture of where projects are getting stuck and whether resources are reaching priority areas.
Towards a regional climate finance scorecard
The minister proposed a regional scorecard that could help East African countries identify bottlenecks and measure the effectiveness of climate finance.
Such a mechanism could provide greater visibility into whether funding is reaching adaptation projects, local governments and vulnerable communities, areas that can struggle to compete with large mitigation projects for international capital.
The proposal points to a broader shift in the region’s climate finance conversation: from how much money has been pledged to how much capital has been converted into functioning investments and measurable results.
For East Africa, that distinction could prove critical.
As governments seek to implement the next generation of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC 3.0), the availability of climate finance will matter, but so will the quality of the projects competing for it.
In an increasingly competitive global climate-finance market, bankability may ultimately determine which ambitions receive funding and which remain on paper.
