By Seth Onyango
Across Africa, communities are restoring degraded farmland, rebuilding mangrove forests and creating businesses that protect natural resources while generating income. These initiatives show that the continent has practical responses to climate change, but what many lack is reliable finance to expand beyond individual communities and short funding cycles.
Projects in East Africa illustrate both the potential of locally implemented climate action and the financial barriers holding it back.
In Tanzania’s Mwanza region, within the Lake Victoria watershed, Trees for the Future is using a $2.9 million grant from a United States foundation to expand an agroforestry programme that replaces single-crop fields with combinations of trees, fruit, vegetables, grain and livestock fodder.
The programme plans to support 2,780 smallholder farmers annually between 2026 and 2029, where each participating farm will grow between 2,500 and 4,000 trees. The system is intended to restore depleted soils, diversify food production and help households cope with increasingly unpredictable rainfall.
About 3,000 acres are expected to be restored each year, with approximately 21,900 family members benefiting from improved food supplies. The programme also incorporates savings groups and land-use planning to help participating households retain the benefits after the grant ends.
Trees for the Future says it has trained more than 12,000 farmers and planted over 36 million trees in Tanzania since 2016. Its experience shows that land restoration can be integrated with food production and household income, but also exposes a recurring problem where successful projects often depend on grants whose expiry can limit expansion or leave communities searching for replacement funding.
Along Kenya’s southern coast, communities are using a different model to restore mangrove forests and strengthen livelihoods. At Gazi Bay, the Aga Khan Foundation and Portugal’s Camões Institute are supporting the restoration of 226 hectares of mangrove forest. About 65,000 seedlings have been planted across six hectares.
The Gazi initiative combines restoration with conservation training, enterprises led by women and young people, and efforts to increase revenue from the Gazi Boardwalk. These activities recognise that communities are more likely to protect restored ecosystems when conservation also supports household income.
In Zanzibar, a community-led initiative is rehabilitating 3,300 hectares of mangrove and coral-rag forest across 16 areas. Rather than depending entirely on donor grants, the project plans to generate high-integrity carbon credits to help finance continued restoration.
The projects in Mwanza, Gazi Bay and Zanzibar use different approaches, but they point to the same conclusion that African communities are already restoring soils, protecting coastlines, conserving forests and building climate-related enterprises. The financing challenge is to help these initiatives grow without burdening communities with unaffordable debt or leaving them dependent on short-term grants.
That challenge is expected to feature prominently as African leaders gather for the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). African countries are seeking increased adaptation finance, delivery of loss and damage commitments, and changes to an international financial system marked by high borrowing costs, mounting debt and complicated funding procedures.
The central question is whether global climate finance can move from pledges and specialised funding mechanisms to capital that African institutions and communities can access and use.
The 2026 Africa Sustainable Development Report underlines the scale of the problem. It records progress in 12 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, but concludes that the advances are neither fast nor extensive enough to meet the 2030 targets. The report identifies financing shortages, inadequate infrastructure, limited institutional capacity, conflict, climate shocks and rising debt-service costs as major barriers.
“Structural constraints including financing shortfalls, limited institutional capacities, and frequent climate and economic shocks have slowed progress and, in some areas, reversed gains,” it says.
Climate finance is therefore not a separate environmental concern, as it influences whether farmers can protect food production, coastal settlements can withstand storms and erosion, and climate-vulnerable countries an preserve development gains.
Philip Kilonzo, head of policy, advocacy and communication at the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance, says the main problem is not an absence of local solutions but financing systems that failed to reflect conditions at the community level.
“Adaptation is local, and African communities have demonstrated that they have requisite solutions,” he says. “The unjustifiable gap is in complex financing models and modalities that are yet to come to reality with what is needed to deliver climate action at the front line.”
According to Diana Nabiruma, manager of programmes and communications at Uganda’s Africa Institute for Energy Governance, financing could also help communities build businesses around clean energy and conservation.
She cites clean-energy enterprises, beekeeping and sustainable nature-based tourism as activities that allow people to earn an income while conserving forests or reducing dependence on polluting energy sources.
“Africa does not lack climate solutions. It lacks the scale, finance and enabling systems needed to take proven African solutions from communities to national and continental levels,” said Imali Ngusale, strategic lead at the Africa Centre for Health, Climate and Gender Justice Alliance.
The article has been republished from Bird Story Agency: https://agency.birdstoryagency.com/stories/africa-pushes-for-climate-finance-at-unga-as-local-fixes-prove-effective?locale=en
