African Climate Foundation Launches Five-Year Strategy Centred on Local Transition

The African Climate Foundation launched its 2026-2030 strategy with a central premise that Africa's climate transition must be designed and driven from within the continent rather than imposed through externally designed solutions. The strategy focuses on clean energy access, resilience, green industrialisation and strengthening Africa's influence in global climate finance architecture.

Speaking at the strategy launch, ACF Executive Director Saliem Fekir outlined the foundation's role as providing logistical and institutional support to ensure that Africans leading the climate transition have the organisations, capabilities and investment platforms they need. The 2026-2030 strategy draws on six years of programmatic experience across the continent and is framed around the principle that climate action and development are inseparable objectives rather than competing priorities. The spectre of a potential super El Niño affecting African weather patterns added urgency to the strategy's release.

Africa's climate finance challenge is structurally distinct from that of large emerging economies like India and China. African nations are simultaneously highly climate-vulnerable, low in historical emissions, and facing sovereign debt constraints that limit their capacity to absorb loans from development banks. The ACF strategy explicitly advocates for a shift in global climate finance toward grant-based and concessional instruments, and for African agency in designing the frameworks through which international finance is accessed and deployed.

The foundation's emphasis on green industrialisation reflects a strategic opportunity: Africa's rich endowments of critical minerals needed for energy transition technologies — lithium, cobalt, manganese — position the continent as a potential industrial actor in the clean energy supply chain rather than only a raw material exporter. The strategy seeks to build African capacity to add value domestically and to shape the governance of critical mineral supply chains in ways that generate lasting economic benefit for African communities.

Key figure — 2026-2030 five-year strategy launched by African Climate Foundation