The United Nations Capital Development Fund has entered into a new agreement in Mali on April 2019. This agreement between the Local Authorities National Investment Agency (ANICT) and UNCDF, through the Local Climate Adaptive Living Facility (LoCAL), is a strategic partnership in order to scale up the programme to the national level.

The LoCAL programme supports the mainstreaming of climate resilience and adaptation into local planning and budgeting through financial support in the form of performance-based climate resilience grants, technical and capacity building support, and annual performance assessments. Under this agreement, the ANICT and UNCDF through the LoCAL programme will collaborate on the design, the piloting and the establishment of a methodology for climate risk analysis and local climate information system. The LoCAL mechanism was introduced in two pilot communes in Mali, in 2014, in order to present the outcomes to local and national stakeholders and to scale the programme nationally.

This agreement will continue to support the Mali government’s National Climate Change Policy. This agreement includes technical assistance to ANICT on implementing methodologies relating to climate risk analyses and vulnerabilities. ANICT and UNCDF will joint efforts to build partnerships for the progressive scaling of the mechanism. Jointly, they will emphasize the importance of the role of local authorities in confronting climate change particularly in the “COP 25” Climate Change Conference in December 2019 in Chile, led by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Global Climate Fund (GCF).

In Mali, LoCAL's phase I has supported the country’s National Climate Change Policy. The first adaptation measures implemented in Mali included 6.5- and 2.5-hectare market gardening plots for women’s groups, equipped with supplementary pools, hedges and wire fencing as well as solar panels to provide energy to an automated water pump. These measures benefited directly to 6,000 people, the majority of whom are women. Mali is preparing for the scale up to LoCAL mechanism to the national level (Phase II). It’s the fourth country preparing actively to scale up, with Benin, Bhutan and Cambodia.

The programme is currently working with 107 local governments in 14 countries, representing over 6 million people. In May 2019, the LoCAL mechanism was officially integrated as a supplement to the technical guidelines that the UNFCCC endorses for least developed countries (LDCs) to assist them to “reduce vulnerability to the impacts of climate change, by building adaptive capacity and resilience, and by facilitating the integration of climate change adaptation into development planning,” also known as the National Adaptation Plan (NAP) process.