Expanding access to and deploying climate adaptation solutions in developing countries

The Technical Assistance (TA) Facility is a grant-funded facility led by Lightsmith and supported by the United States Department of State and the Nordic Development Fund. The TA Facility is aligned with the CRAFT Fund with the goal to accelerate application of Portfolio Companies’ climate resilience solutions in Lower Income Countries, Small Island Developing States, and among Vulnerable Populations, such as smallholder farmers, low-income communities, indigenous and remote communities, and communities greatly affected by specific climate vulnerabilities.

The TA Facility focuses on project preparation efforts to de-risk market entry and overcome barriers to deployment of climate resilience solutions in developing countries as well as to engage in more detailed evaluation of the impact of these solutions. Specific eligible activities include:

Market studies
Pilot preparation and implementation
Capacity building
Knowledge creation and dissemination
Impact analysis

TA Facility Partners

The TA Facility is funded in part by a grant from the United States Department of State and in part by a grant from the Nordic Development Fund.

TA Facility Projects

To date, the TA Facility has provided grants for the implementation of the following projects:

Addressing Water Scarcity in Small Island Developing States

The TA Facility deployed capital into SOURCE Global to install off-grid, self-contained hydropanels that produce affordable drinkable water from ambient air, powered entirely by solar energy, in new geographies. In Papua New Guinea, the TA Facility funded activities to provide drinking water to rural and remote water-stressed communities. Activities included site assessment and preparation, manufacture, shipment, and installation of the panels, stakeholder engagement, implementation, and development of marketing materials, including a case study.

SOURCE is also partnering with a water utility company in Tonga, the Tonga Water Board, and a government entity in Vanuatu, the Ministry of Education and Training, to replicate the government partnership model in these markets and more broadly in the Pacific Islands.

Enhancing Farmer Resilience in India

The TA Facility deployed capital into WayCool Foods to enhance products and services enabling climate resilience for farmers in India. Activities include deploying IoT weather stations for farmers, developing a crop pest and disease detection AI tool, capacity building for the potato supply chain in Assam and Bihar provinces, and developing the processes for inventorying GHGs mitigated due to food loss waste avoidance in the supply chain processes of WayCool Foods.

More details on the recently completed potato supply chain activities are included in the project case study linked here.

Increasing Food Security in East Africa

The TA Facility is also partnering with WayCool Foods to address food security in East Africa through deployment of the company’s hardware and software technologies to provide farm-level data and analytics to enhance the capacity of farmers and Farmer Producer Organizations/Farmer Cooperatives (FCOs) to become more climate resilient. Starting implementation in Kenya, TA Activities will include supporting market entry of WayCool Foods into East Africa; building the capacity and dataset of the technologies; demonstrating the impacts of the technologies; and building climate resilience and enhancing food security for FCOs, smallholder farmers, and the agricultural supply chain.

Aga Khan Foundation Kenya is facilitating deployment of the digital technologies and leading the engagement with farmers for the piloting of these technologies.