GCF launches the Digital Accreditation Platform
On 22 March 2022, the Green Climate Fund (GCF) launched the new Digital Accreditation Platform (DAP).
GCF is a country-driven partnership institution, and the DAP comes as part of GCF’s digital transformation efforts to bridge gaps and transform business processes with GCF’s partner ecosystem. The DAP replaces the custom-built Online Accreditation System, which has been used since 2014, to support the accreditation of GCF’s partners.
Accredited Entities (AEs) are important as they work directly with countries through their National Designated Authorities to develop project ideas and submit funding proposals to GCF for projects that align country programming priorities with GCF’s strategic plans, sectors guides and programming directions. Upon project approval, AEs are responsible for project oversight, management, monitoring and reporting to GCF. AEs can be subnational, national, regional or international, public or private institutions. To become a GCF AE, institutions go through a process of “accreditation,” which is designed to assess their capabilities in financial management and safeguarding projects and programmes among other criteria. Once institutions are approved by the GCF Board and formally become AEs, GCF requires AEs to meet accreditation standards and report regularly during their five-year accreditation term with GCF.
The DAP is built on top of Pegasystems low-code platform and is capable of handling dynamically changing business processes, digitalising and automating stages in the accreditation lifecycle in support of GCF partnerships with potential partners and AEs. The DAP will allow GCF to increase efficiency and responsiveness to partners.
In the DAP, GCF has integrated improved guidance notes for applicants and tailored, fit-for-purpose review checklists viewable by applicants and to be used by the GCF Secretariat and the independent Accreditation Panel in their reviews of applications. This will help GCF better assist applicants in responding to feedback on their applications seamlessly on the platform while enhancing transparency throughout the application review process. GCF plans to develop new modules on the DAP to automate data aggregation and track pipeline and applicant statuses further to enhance communications and transparency with applicants and AEs.
During the GCF Introductory Webinar on 8 March 2022, Stephanie Kwan, Head of the Accreditation and Entity Relations Unit a.i., noted that the DAP is built as a one-stop-shop for institutional-level engagement with applicants and AEs to cover all stages of accreditation. This includes the accreditation of new AE partners, responses by AEs in addressing their conditions of accreditation, applications for AEs to upgrade their accreditation scope to scale-up their programming engagement with GCF, re-accreditation every five years to continue the partnership, institutional-level monitoring and reporting by AEs during their accreditation term, and AEs and applicant contact information and data management.
Nebi Bekiri, Digital Transformation Lead and Deputy Head of ICT a.i. added that digitalising business operations are one of the four major implementation goals in GCF’s Digital Agenda 2020-2023. The DAP improves the functioning of GCF’s accreditation processes with key capabilities such as business process automation, integration, robotic process automation, and analytics while enhancing the platform’s reliability, maintainability and security.
Visit the GCF introductory webinars on the Digital Accreditation Platform for Accreditation Applicants organised on 8 March 2022 to view the overview of the DAP and a detailed demonstration of this accreditation module.