Tanzania to gain from $350 million in climate change funding

Dar es Salaam. Tanzania, along with four other countries, are set to benefit from a global $350 million fund disbursed through the Climate Investment Funds (CIF) to finance nature-based solutions to climate change threats.

The money is to be disbursed through the Zambezi Watercourse, according to information posted on the Zambezi Commission website at ambezicommission.org

According to the statement, apart from Tanzania, other five of the Zambezi’s riparian states of Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique and Namibia will also benefit from the funding with regional support for the inter-governmental Zambezi Watercourse Commission (ZAMCOM).

The statement quotes ZAMCOM executive secretary Felix Ngamlagosi as saying that at the 27th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27) in Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt, in November 2022, the Zambezi Watercourse region was named one of the only five countries or regions to be funded by the CIF’s Nature, People and Climate (NPC) investment platform which was launched in June 2022. 

The CIF NPC pilots and scales transformative nature-based climate solutions in developing countries.

 The four other states of this first set of countries and regions to benefit from the CIF NPC fund are Egypt, the Dominican Republic, Fiji and Kenya. ZAMCOM is an intergovernmental organisation set up through the ZAMCOM Agreement of 2004 by the eight riparian states that share the Zambezi Watercourse. These are Angola, Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

According to Mr Ngamlagosi, the funds for the Zambezi Watercourse region will particularly be directed at restoration of 30,000 hectares of degraded wetlands. This financial boost will add impetus to multi-pronged, trans-boundary efforts in this critical southern African watercourse ecosystem which includes the riparian states making up ZAMCOM. ZAMCOM works to ensure equitable and reasonable utilization, as well as the efficient management and sustainable development of the Zambezi Watercourse. “The selection process for project proposals was highly competitive.  After the programme was announced in June 2022, a total of 55 emerging countries, equivalent to one-third of all the developing world, formally applied for CIF NPC funding.

These countries span six continents and represent a population of more than 2 billion people,” Mr Ngamlagosi is quoted as saying in the statement posted on the website.

In particular, he pointed out, the integrated and multi-sectoral investment initiative, Programme for Integrated Development and Adaptation to Climate Change (PIDACC) Zambezi as having “a significant and sizeable financial and technical resource requirement for implementation of the planned climate change activities in the Zambezi watercourse.”

“In this regard, the CIF funds shall play a crucial role in reducing the financing gap. The CIF funding support will enable the scaled development of climate change adaptation projects that bring development benefits, at the national level in participating countries, and at a regional scale across the Zambezi Watercourse," Mr Ngamlagosi said.

He added: PIDACC Zambezi is a huge Investment programme covering eight riparian states, 13 sub-basins and touching lives of over 40 million watercourse inhabitants,”