How CPCS is helping Africa integrate climate resilience into infrastructure investment processes
CPCS, with Grid Advisors, is working with the Global Center on Adaptation (GCA) to make climate resilience a standard part of how Africa’s infrastructure gets financed, approved, and delivered. Our role is helping turn high-level climate ambitions into day-to-day decision-making tools for institutions and governments.
Key points
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In East Africa, CPCS and GRID Advisors are reshaping guarantee approvals, ensuring that climate risk assessments and adaptation measures are baked into financial decision‑making.
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In Mali, CPCS is reinforcing vulnerable road networks by combining hazard analysis, adaptation planning, and system‑level integration to future‑proof transport infrastructure.
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Across the continent, CPCS, GRID and Groupe Huit are mainstreaming climate adaptation, pushing it from high‑level strategy into the everyday systems, budgets, and decisions that shape infrastructure outcomes, in particular as part of GCA’s Public Private Infrastructure Resilience Accelerator Services in Africa framework agreement.
East Africa: Climate-proofing infrastructure guarantees
In this region, we’re working with GRID Advisors to support Dhamana, an institutional guarantee provider, in integrating climate resilience considerations into their guarantee approval processes.
This work demonstrates how climate adaptation can be mainstreamed within financial decision-making frameworks, rather than treated as a parallel or an afterthought. Doing so will shift how future infrastructure across the region is screened and financed.
What CPCS and GRID are doing:
- Developing climate‑risk assessments and adaptation measures directly into projects currently seeking a guarantee.
- Training Dhamana’s employees to apply climate‑resilience criteria consistently over the long term.
West Africa: Strengthening road network resilience in Mali
CPCS and GRID are advising the World Bank’s Mali Connectivity and Road Resilience Project and supporting the country’s broader road rehabilitation program.
With roads increasingly damaged by flooding, extreme heat, and drought, the government needs more than short‑term repairs, it needs systems that can anticipate and reduce climate impacts.
The expected outcome is a clearer roadmap for embedding climate resilience inside Mali’s transport sector operations.
Our technical assistance includes:
- Mapping hazards and vulnerabilities along key corridors.
- Prioritizing adaptation options and identifying costs and financing opportunities.
- Integrating resilience into road‑asset management and maintenance systems.
- Designing a reusable framework to push adaptation plans closer to funding readiness.
- Assessing data, budgets, policies and systems to pinpoint institutional gaps.
Why it matters
These mandates signal a shift happening across the continent: climate resilience is becoming a routine part of infrastructure planning. Instead of focusing only on long‑term climate strategies, governments and institutions are starting to build climate considerations into their core processes from guarantee approvals to road‑maintenance systems.
Bottom line
Through our partnership with GCA, CPCS is helping African institutions close the gap between climate ambition and real‑world execution. The work is making climate resilience an operational requirement not just a strategic talking point across some of the continent’s most important infrastructure systems.
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