Climate Adaptation Financing and Economic Transformation

Climate change has caused $1.5 trillion in global losses, hitting vulnerable communities in least developed countries hardest. Droughts, floods, and health crises threaten food security and incomes, disproportionately affecting women. Only a fraction of climate adaptation funding reaches these communities, partly due to ineffective delivery channels. Credit union networks in Benin and Senegal, with over 7 million members, could bridge this gap, but their efforts to finance specific climate adaptation solutions (like solar pumps) have struggled to scale.

The World Council of Credit Unions (WOCCU) and its partner YAPU Solutions will pilot Adaptation Climatique et Transformation Économique (ACTE), an innovative approach to enhance the adaptive capacity and climate resilience of vulnerable communities in Benin and Senegal to address localized climate risks through increased access to gender-responsive climate adaption finance, reaching 4,000 people with green loans and an additional 61,000 people whose businesses have been assessed for climate risk as part of their loan application (45% women) over two years. Its customer-centric, holistic and scalable methodology aims to redefine how credit union networks assess borrower climate risk and deliver gender-responsive climate adaptation finance and prepare them to secure climate funding for future growth by:

Delivering capacity building, digital tools, and performance-based incentives: ACTE will pilot with six credit unions affiliated with FECECAM (Benin) and UM-PAMECAS (Senegal), two prominent credit union networks together comprising 161 credit unions with 2.4 million members (48% women) and 1.2 million borrowers (36% women). Through training, policy guidance and user-friendly digital tools ACTE will equip them with the skills and resources to address evolving climate vulnerabilities. Performance-based incentives (PBIs) will foster active engagement while AI-supported gender-disaggregated data analytics will spur uptake, ensure impact for borrowers and enable credit unions to navigate a dynamically to shifting environmental and socioeconomic conditions.

Increasing knowledge and defining best practices: The systematic documentation and dissemination of gender-responsive, data-driven lessons will create a foundation for future transformation through scaling and replication within FECECAM and UM-PAMECAS, across West Africa and - by leveraging WOCCU’s network - globally.

The project's objective is to enhance the adaptive capacity and climate resilience of vulnerable communities in Benin and Senegal to address localized climate risks through increased access to gender-responsive climate adaption finance.