The African Development Bank and Climate Investment Funds (CIF) has ended a three-day workshop in the country to enhance in-country gender-responsive monitoring, evaluation and reporting capacity in Ghana’s forestry sector.

Gender-responsive monitoring, evaluation and reporting are essential to promote gender equality and ensure that development interventions are inclusive, effective, and sustainable. The workshop was an opportunity to discuss consistency and complementarity between individual CIF supported projects and the country investment plan. Ghana is resuming investment plan reporting for 2022 results after suspending country-level monitoring and evaluation during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Tabi Agyarko, Forest Investment Program project manager at the Ministry of Land and Natural Resources, affirmed the workshop’s relevance to the forestry sector.

“It is very useful that this workshop preceded the validation of the Ghana FIP annual report. This should be done regularly to enhance the understanding of FIP monitoring, evaluation and reporting guidelines before annual reporting.”
Tabi Agyarko

Gender-responsive monitoring, evaluation, and reporting are crucial in ensuring that development programs and policies are designed and implemented with a gender perspective. It involves collecting, analyzing, and reporting data to capture the different experiences, needs, and priorities of women and men.

The program is supporting the development of a gender-responsive Ghana 2022 Forest Investment Plan results report. It also seeks to address the country’s current monitoring and reporting challenges while exploring opportunities to improve data quality and data management for forestry projects, including sex-disaggregated data.

Importance of the Workshop

Ollame Bekale, African Development Bank principal country program officer for Ghana, highlighted the importance of the workshop.

“This workshop is a good opportunity to showcase the bank’s engagement in advancing the climate action agenda and striving for more impact. We thank the Government of Ghana for its contribution to this effort and the CIF to make it happen.”
Ollame Bekale

CIF’s business model is characterized by a country-led programmatic approach with strategically linked, large-scale investments aligned with national priorities. Investments are designed and implemented using a participatory and multi-stakeholder approach.

The workshop brought together 40 participants, comprising project implementation teams and other stakeholders of Forest Investment Program projects in Ghana, and representatives of the African Development Bank and the World Bank. Participants discussed key implementation challenges and lessons learned that can inform future programming at the national and regional level while applying a gender lens.

In Ghana, the Forest Investment Program has provided over $75 million to support projects that unite the public and private sectors and indigenous people and local communities to restore degraded forest landscapes and improve forest management and sustainability. Efforts include promoting sustainable cocoa and climate-smart agriculture and agro-forestry systems, restoration of degraded off-reserve forests and conservation of community dedicated forests and sacred groves, alternate livelihoods development, and facilitating institutional capacity building and policy reforms.

With $11.1 billion pledged, the Climate Investment Funds (CIF) is one of the largest active climate finance mechanism in the world. CIF has invested in almost 400 projects in 72 low- and middle-income countries. Independent evaluations have shown that CIF accelerates climate action by empowering transformations through programs in the areas of clean technology, energy access, climate resilience, and sustainable forests in middle- and low-income countries.

Established at the request of G8 and G20 countries in 2008, CIF works exclusively through six multilateral development banks (MDBs) to mobilize investments to pilot and scale cutting-edge climate solutions to address frontier climate challenges the MDBs can’t fight on their own.

As an Implementing Entity of the CIF, the African Development Bank supported the development of 39 investment plans across 27 African countries with the objective of unlocking climate action. As of end December 2022, the African Development Bank has approved a total of 34 projects for which it deployed $946 million in CIF resources and a total of $1,993 million of its own co-financing. The disbursement rate stands at 74%.