GCF rolls out new and improved Readiness Programme

The Green Climate Fund (GCF) recently launched its revised Readiness and Preparatory Support Programme (the Readiness Programme).

As the world’s largest climate action capacity-building programme, Readiness supports developing countries in strengthening their institutional capacities, governance mechanisms, and planning and programming frameworks to achieve a transformational long-term climate action agenda. Readiness support is also deployed to enhance sub-national, national and regional organisations accredited to GCF (Direct Access Entities).

The revised Readiness builds on the new 2024-2027 Readiness Strategy, successes, and lessons learned over the past years and reflects feedback obtained from consultations with countries and partners.

The revised Programme focuses on delivering measurable, tangible outcomes that align with country priorities and the GCF Strategic Plan 2024-2027. It contributes to the Fund’s “50by30,” a roadmap for GCF to manage USD 50 billion by 2030 with maximum efficiency and impact.

Countries and partners can expect to find the following features in the revised Readiness:

Simpler and easier to access

• Move from a yearly grant cycle to a four-year programming cycle.
• This reduces transaction costs and time to access Readiness support, improves funding predictability, and promotes systems thinking in addressing capacity gaps and a structured progression path to 'being ready.'

Coordination support

• More coordination support to countries when designing, requesting, and implementing Readiness support.
• Countries can design specific terms of reference and competitively appoint the most qualified and best-suited delivery partners (DPs) from a list of pre-qualified specialist service providers.
• Countries and entities can choose from a pre-qualified specialist service providers list, which will cut procurement timelines and provide fast access to international and local experts. 

Enhanced country programming support

• Readiness to be used as a programming tool to support countries in developing impactful country programmes.
• 60% of Readiness funding will be dedicated to building a country-originated investment pipeline to unlock finance from GCF.

Grow local capacity and expertise 

• Countries can request the placement of a GCF expert directly within a national agency to help build local capacity in ideation, programming and implementation of GCF-funded projects.

Knowledge-sharing

• A portion of Readiness funding to be provided to countries and DAEs to share their knowledge and experience to contribute towards better outcomes for climate action.

For more details about the revised Readiness Programme, please visit Readiness support.