USAID and Rockefeller Foundation launch $100m climate fund for Africa and Asia

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Rockefeller Foundation have launched a US$100 million (£60 million) fund to help countries in Africa and Asia improve their resiliency to climate change.

The two organisations launched the Global Resilience Partnership initiative on Tuesday and will focus on developing countries and regions, particularly in the Horn of Africa, and South and Southeast Asia where typhoons, floods, earthquakes and drought have been becoming more common.

Michael Yates, director of the USAID regional mission in Asia, said: “Both USAID and the Rockefeller Foundation see resilience as a vital framework to help alleviate poverty, promote more sustainable development and lessen the impacts of disasters. In Bangladesh, rising sea levels threaten to drown one-fifth of the country’s land mass where 18 million people now reside. In Nepal, over 2 million people live on potentially hazardous fault lines. According to the World Bank, $1 out of every $3 in development funding is lost as a result of recurring crises, and over the last 30 years that has added up to a total of $3.8 trillion.”

Ashvin Dayal, the Rockefeller Foundation’s associate vice president and managing director in Asia, said: “The work of USAID and Rockefeller Foundation in some of the world’s most vulnerable regions shows that building resilience reduces the likelihood that stresses or sudden disruptions turn into a disaster.”

Michael Yates, director of the USAID regional mission in Asia said: “Both USAID and the Rockefeller Foundation see resilience as a vital framework to help alleviate poverty, promote more sustainable development and lessen the impacts of disasters”.

The GRP’s first project is the Global Resilience Design Challenge, a multi-phase competition to be launched in September at the USAID Frontiers in Development Forum in Washington, D.C.

Applicants will submit proposals by November on how to make communities in the initiatives focus regions more resilient to disasters, food insecurity and the effects of climate change.

The investment of US$100 million has been described by USAID and the foundation as an initial figure and they are in discussions with various stakeholders about further funding.

The GRP will also look at developing flexible financing, predictive analytics and technologies such as crowd-sourced data collection, vulnerability and crisis mapping, and early warning systems.