Uganda, like all developing countries, has been a recipient of foreign assistance since independence, and the debate on its efficacy remains a polarising subject. Yet again, with the changing climatic patterns taking a toll largely as a result of emissions by developed countries, poor ones have to rely on external handouts—the same foreign aid model— to secure their future as Frederic Musisi & Leonard Mukooli write.
The verdant revolving hills of Mountain Elgon are breathtaking during the dry season as they are scary when torrential rains begin to pound the area. These days the sub- region is receiving above normal rains.
For the most part, heavy rains punctuated with hailstones and lightning trigger a thundering sludge downhill, which barrels through gardens, houses and is often destructive.
As a result, development partners, NGOs and to some extent government have intensified interventionist projects, including the Trees for Global Benefits project financed by United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to plant some 10,000 acres of trees across the five hills in Mbale district, to mitigate the impact of the disasters.
At Shibanga hill in Nyondo subcounty in Mbale, the project introduced a component of carbon financing, a tool for buying carbon credits earned from sustainable projects. How it works is simple, the Mbale district environment officer Charles Wekube explained; select farmers were interested in planting specific tree species such as cordia and albizia that assist in carbon arresting.
“UNDP contracted a partner organisation which monitors the carbon project, and they are in charge of paying the individual farmers,” Mr Wekube said. “The farmers are paid quarterly or bi-annually using a formula that shows how much carbon has been contained by the farm acreage.”
“It is proven that the coffee planted within certain types of trees yields well and farmers harvest their coffee routinely as they are paid to keep the trees that help in carbon offsetting,” reveals Wekube.
According to Ecotrust, the UNDP partner agency, farmers aggregate their carbon credits and sell as a cooperative offsetting scheme with each individual farmer entering into a contract specifying clearly what their performance targets are and the corresponding expected payments.
One of the beneficiary farmers, Edward Wangonte a resident of Shibunga village explained that they were told to plant trees that grow up to 25 years.
“Over the last two years I have received Shs1.2million which I have used mainly to pay school fees. At times they pay in time, and other times they take long but at least we are paid so for that matter I will keep my plantation,” he said.
Mr Wekube said there are seven farmers under the carbon-financing program in Mbale. In other instances, farmers and landowners on the slopes just received tree seedlings—mainly pine—which help to hold the soils compact.
Conservation for whom?
Studies have showed that the main landslide types on the Mountain Elgon slopes are debris slumps which occur where water concentrates as the top soils have a high infiltration rate which allows fast flow of water into the deeper clay-rich horizons promoting water stagnation causing slope failure, with rainfall as the main trigger.
Hence, it is expected that massive tree planting across the slopes could reduce the landslides as well as help in carbon offsetting.
The Trees for Global Benefits is one of the oldest carbon finance projects in the country, where farmers receive cash handouts to plant trees; payments are stopped when the trees reach an agreed timeframe.
Such incentive is among the initiatives that donors and NGOs are employing in various parts of the country to change people’s perceptions towards environmental destruction and preserve the eco-system. While a detailed cost-benefit analysis of the scheme is yet to be undertaken, the UNDP Resident Representative, Ms Elsie Attafuah in an interview described the approach as a “balance.”
“Developing countries like Uganda require extra support. In the climate space we do have a whole financial instrument we call result based financing; for example, if a country keeps its forest cover or trees under a certain baseline, they get compensated.”
Attafuah said there is a general recognition that emissions have come from some countries, and as a way of compensation they are supposed to mobilise money to the developing countries to avoid similar mistakes.
“Take for instance the second biodiversity area in the world, next door—the Congo basin—from Democratic Republic of Congo and all the Central African countries, and its contribution to our atmosphere. The fact is that countries know their responsibilities and have signed on a national determined contribution agenda, in which they pledge to commit to an incentive mechanism; recognising the good that these countries are doing,” she argued.
In 2017, government formulated the REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) action plan to support policy approaches which promote sustainable forest management, biodiversity conservation and enhancement of forest carbon stocks, such as the Trees for Global Benefits projects which has also been implemented in western and south western Uganda.
However, amidst competing priorities, there are fears that government has left the bulk of discussions and efforts on environmental conservation to donors and NGOs. Analysis of the various projects shows that government has committed to co-financing but usually it never fulfills its part of the bargain, which is affecting work or waters down projects once donor financing elapses. Likewise, the water and environment sector is one of the chronically underfunded dockets in the national budget.
Attafuah said government is doing what it can “and it is always that something can always be improved.”
The Water and Environment Permanent Secretary, Alex Okidi told Vox Populi that the issue is that government has a limited resource envelope but they are “stepping up bit by bit.”
“It is not that government is hiding. But important to note is that government has come out clearly that environment is a priority, and for that matter we are now getting a mix of grants and loans for financing to address some of the issues,” Mr Okidi said.
Over the last decade, Uganda has received a modest chunk of financing—climate cash—from developed countries to help the developing world to tackle adverse effects of the changing climatic patterns. There is yet a detailed summary of how much has been received or where it has been spent but officials acknowledged that money is coming in.
Most of the money has trickled and is trickling in as international development aid through the likes of World Bank, UNDP, African Development Bank, and some development agencies like UK, Denmark, and others.
For example, UNDP’s portfolio on environmental conservation and climate change is roughly about $75m (approx. Shs278b). Currently the agency is bankrolling several projects from both its portfolio or with co-financing from among others, the Global Environment Facility (GEF), established in 1991 to provide grants and concessional funding to cover costs associated with climate change.
Access to climate cash from GEF is limited; it can only come through select international institutions. Also, previously, the government did not have enough capacity to pitch bankable projects and as such the likes of UNDP were doing it on behalf of the country.
Okidi however revealed that government is now accredited to access cash directly from the Adaptation Fund—set up under the Kyoto Protocol to offer funds to developing countries to adapt to the harmful effects of climate change—and the Green Climate Fund (GCF)—the world’s largest dedicated fund helping developing countries reduce their greenhouse gas emissions set up by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2010.
“Over the years we have received a lot of money, and it has helped Uganda in several ways,” Okidi said.
At the mercy of donors
In the grand scheme of things, like for all other donor-funded projects, sustainability is failing a number of projects. A few years after financing closes, and in the absence of robust sustainability mechanisms, the projects start fading.
To Attafuah, sustainability is a collective issue but Okidi contends that what is important is for the money to be channeled to what is supposed to do “to ensure that intended outputs are achieved.”
In 2007, government initiated its first National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPA), pilot projects by donors and government to tackle climate change specifically by responding to communities’ urgent needs to adapt to climate change.
The NAPA identified nine adaptation priority areas, which included land degradation management, strengthening meteorological services, community water and sanitation, water for production, drought adaptation, vectors, pests and disease control, indigenous knowledge and natural resource management and climate change and development planning. Government subsequently got first funding in 2012 from the Least Developed Country Fund (LDCF).
The LCDF was established in 2001, as part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—the main international agreement on climate change reached in 1992— and later gave birth to the Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997 but took effect in 2005, and the Paris Agreement signed in 2015 and came into force in 2016.
The LDCF is overseen by the GEF. To access funds from the LDCF, developing countries were required to develop National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPAs), the proposals submitted to UNFCC. Uganda developed its NAPA in 2007, submitted and accessed the first funds in 2012.
Uganda’s first six NAPA projects were piloted in eastern and southwestern Uganda. The projects covered among others, climate change, land degradation, and biodiversity, implemented through among others World Bank, UNIDO, Food and Agricultural Organisation.
Today, a number of projects implemented as NAPAs are in shambles. A 2016 report titled, “Uganda’s National Adaptation Programme of Action: Implementation, Challenges and Emerging Lessons” detailed that the NAPA process did not establish a sustainability strategy as part of a comprehensive monitoring and evaluation plan.
“While the aim of the NAPA projects was to build community resilience, beneficiaries were not ready to adopt the new climat- resilient technologies without more assistance from the project at the end of the implementation period, except for water storage tanks and the valley dam technologies,” the report reads in part.
“The implementation period of one year was not sufficient to build long-term sustainability of the adaptation activities amongst communities, and the lessons learned have not been documented,” it added.
The only result of the project was, “creating opportunity for learning and identifying challenges that communities are facing in adapting to climate change, which were used to develop the National Adaptation Plan (NAP).”
Okidi said Uganda has been going through a learning phase and going forward, there is commitment on both sides of government and donors to do better.
“I can clearly tell you that the portfolio of UNDP has done well for us. They get money from developed countries and multinationals to create development,” Okidi said, adding, “So for us to have development we need to cooperate with them so we learn more, and most importantly the money needs to be channeled where it is needed and ensure the intended outputs are attained.”
Jackson Muhindo, the Resilience & Climate Change Coordinator at Oxfam-Uganda told Vox Populi that Uganda is responding positively, including boosting capacity to formulate bankable projects and directly access cash from the GEF and Adaptation Fund.
“Investment is something very good, but we want to see more climate-smart investments,” Muhindo said, adding, “We should employ scientists to do some projections on how much we shall be contributing in our quest to industrialise, so we realign our development.”
At the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference held in the Danish capital, Copenhagen, developed countries agreed to mobilise a financial war-chest of $100 billion a year by 2020 through the existing financing mechanisms to support efforts by under developed and vulnerable countries to enable their economies to adapt to changing climatic patterns.
A 2019 study titled “Foreign Aid and Climate Change Policy” on the relationship between climate aid and recipient climate policy by the Finnish United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research, detailed that although disbursements have lagged behind these commitments, there seems little doubt that climate aid is on the rise.
According to the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), total climate-related aid rose from around $700 million in 2000 to $19 billion in 2010 to $52 billion in 2016.
“Climate aid is donors’ key policy lever for helping poor countries cope with climate change. If it does not work, we must ask whether these funds could be more effectively used in other ways,” the study noted.
Article 9 of the 2015 Paris Agreement that presents an action plan to limit global warming at 2°Celcius from 2020 onwards, stipulates that developed countries shall provide financial resources to assist developing country parties with respect to both mitigation and adaptation.
The agreement also established financial mechanisms to provide funds to developing country parties, including operation of financial mechanisms entrusted to the GEF and GCF, which decides on climate change policies, programme priorities and eligibility criteria for funding. However, in countries like Uganda where the environment is not a priority, it is likely that even accessing climate cash is not much of a priority.
