81279726-Legal and transaction advisory GETPro - Covenant of Mayors in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The Covenant of Mayors in Sub-Saharan Africa (CoM SSA) initiative supports Sub-Saharan African cities and local governments in their fight against climate change and to ensure access to clean energy. Under the CoM SSA, local authorities are invited to make a voluntarily political commitment to plan and implement climate and energy actions. As of today, over 250 local administrations have joined the CoM SSA, and more are in the process of becoming signatories. The Covenant of Mayors in Sub-Saharan Africa is co-funded by the European Union (EU) and the German Ministry for Economic Development and Cooperation (BMZ). It is co-implemented by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), the Agence Française de Développement (AFD), Expertise France and the Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo (AECID). The project supports signatory local administrations to increase access to sustainable energy for urban populations and implement local actions to combat climate change and its impacts through three areas: 1. Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plans (SEACAP) Development; 2. Support urban energy and climate-related infrastructure investments; and 3. Promoting city-to-city cooperation and enhance learning from good practices. Currently, the GIZ support to CoM SSA is extended to selected CoM SSA signatories in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Kenya, and Nigeria on the above three areas. GIZ CoM SSA supports local governments in the project development and infrastructure investment process in two windows - early stage (up till prefeasibility) and late stage (feasibility and beyond). To this end, the GIZ CoM SSA has employed the following modes of technical assistance for local governments: - Technical advisory on climate and energy planning at the city level - Technical advisory on early-stage project development: Defining project concepts, identifying project structure, relevant data collection, developing technical assessments such as pre-feasibility studies, identification of business models, and other relevant technical advisory required to support the development of investable projects. - Financial advisory: Beyond the individual cities" projects, GIZ CoM SSA has assessed the enabling environment of climate finance in focus countries - covering the extent of decentralisation in the country, financing opportunities for focus sectors, ability of local governments to access national and international financing for projects. This feeds into advising individual projects on developing a roadmap towards access to finance. - Capacity building through trainings and exchanges with other CoM SSA local governments as well as relevant partners (incl. national ministries, private sector, financiers etc)