Clean Transport Finance Academy for African Cities

Finance remains a critical barrier to African cities achieving their climate change goals. Staff in city-level finance departments – including Chief Financial Officers (CFOs), budget directors, or similar – play an essential role in prioritizing and allocating funding that can improve climate resilience and mitigate hazardous air pollutants, including greenhouse gasses. Supporting CFOs in advancing investment in clean transportation systems is a priority for the CFO Network for African Cities' Convening on Clean Transport Finance in Accra, organized by C40, GCoM, and UrbanShift.  

The 3-day event will mark the official launch of the CFO Network for African Cities and will provide in-depth training to expose CFOs and transport leads to foundational climate change concepts and enhance clean transportation project financing. The convening will provide a collaborative space for city decision-makers to workshop ideas and learn technical information from sector experts and other city practitioners in the region.  

Thematic Focus: Clean Transportation Finance 

With the thematic focus on clean transportation finance, participants will learn from best practice in municipal infrastructure project development, share transport-relevant finance knowledge, identify/access finance opportunities, and build climate literacy. In addition, this deep-dive workshop will support national and subnational engagement on clean transportation finance with a view toward driving enabling policies, enhancing fiscal autonomy, and ensuring city projects align with national funding priorities. 

Convening Objectives 

• Enhance climate finance literacy among city-level CFOs and transport leads.  
• Provide an opportunity to engage with other cities, national governments, and present sustainable transport projects to investors, as well as the opportunity to receive advice and feedback from technical experts. 
• Identify finance for city projects through a range of funding sources and financing approaches, tools, business models, etc. and support pipeline development and connections to access financing, funding and technical assistance 
• Share good practices and identify challenges in developing financing strategies for clean transportation projects. 
• Discuss solutions and challenges to work with different levels of government and private sector. 
• Identify pathways to support just transition to clean transportation within the city and learning from one another.