Financing Partnership Platform

Overview

The climate crisis will not be solved without clean cooking. Yet this global crisis remains critically underfunded.

With an estimated $25 billion of carbon finance flowing to clean cooking over the next 25 years, carbon markets are powerful means to rapidly close the financing gap. By significantly driving down costs to customers and enabling companies to grow faster, carbon revenue is accelerating the journey of clean cooking companies becoming bankable for traditional SME lending and investment products. The pace of this journey is however dependent on capital flows to clean cooking carbon projects that are largely financed by on private investment from carbon project developers with deep pockets, project investors, and intermediaries.

The domestic banking sector, together with international lenders, have a unique role in bridging the liquidity-gap throughout the lifecycle of clean cooking carbon projects with lending securitized against early-stage investment capital and carbon offtake contracts and purchase agreements. The additional liquidity can help existing projects to scale faster and enable current investors to partially liquidate their positions and reinvest in new projects.

 The Financing Partnership Platform, launched together with the African Guarantee Fund and the UN Capital Development Fund, seeks to make a significant contribution to the Catalytic Finance Accelerator’s aim of mobilizing at least $100 million in new commitments from banks and investors by 2026—and $500 million by 2030. The Financing Partnership Platform is initially focused on sub-Saharan Africa, where it aims to help at least 1 million more families transition to cleaner cooking solutions by 2030.  

By that date, the Financing Partnership Platform envisions a banking sector that allocates significant capital to clean cooking carbon projects as part of their sustainability and climate action commitments; offers products and terms aligned with the needs of clean cooking carbon projects; and receives support from enabling regulations, concessional capital, and market instruments that incentivize and de-risk lending to clean cooking carbon projects.  

Workstreams

The Financing Partnership Platform has four workstreams: 

1. Developing the capacity of financial institutions to support clean cooking carbon projects and of clean cooking carbon project developers, at different stages of maturity, to make them investment ready. 
2. Incentivizing innovation in private and public instruments and approaches to de-risking investment and lending to clean cooking carbon projects. 
3. Orchestrating structured deals between Financing Partnership Platform members, including banks, international funds, carbon project investors, clean cooking carbon project developers, clean cooking companies, and public and philanthropic funders. 
4. Facilitating large-scale adoption of business models, financial instruments, and clean cooking solutions by intensively communicating about the business cases and tools that support this energy transition.

Partners