Building Climate Resilience at Scale in the Sahel

The primary objective of climate funds is to finance climate action, including adaptation, mitigation, and addressing loss and damage, with the aim of building resilience among vulnerable populations affected by climate impacts such as shifting weather patterns and rising sea levels. However, these funds face challenges that mean climate finance is often slow to reach those most in need.

Social protection systems, which now cover over half of the world’s population, can offer a promising solution to these challenges by channeling direct climate funds efficiently to enhance climate resilience and adaptation among vulnerable populations. Social protection systems, including social registries, early warning systems, and delivery systems can engage large vulnerable populations due to their scale, flexibility, targeting and organizational capabilities, rapidly responding to climate shocks, and ensuring the efficient, transparent use of funds.

This paper demonstrates how existing social protection systems could significantly contribute to the objectives of climate funds by presenting the World Bank’s Sahel Adaptive Social Protection Program (SASPP) as an illustrative case study, focusing on three key dimensions: reach, efficiency, and impact. It makes the case for channeling more climate funds through existing social protection (SP) systems to get support to vulnerable communities faster, more efficiently, and at greater scale.