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 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 Partner

The TA Facility is funded 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 linked here.

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.

Strengthening the Potato Value Chain in Northeast India

The TA Facility and WayCool Foods subsidiary, SV Agri, catalyzed on the momentum gained and the lessons learned from the pilot project described above to develop a follow-on project that seeks to address climate-related risks in the potato supply chain and further improve the resilience of potato farmers in Assam, Bihar, and West Bengal states in India. The follow-on project aims to address critical needs identified during the pilot, such as the need for increased cold storage capacity equipped with solar panels to manage the unreliable grid power in rural areas, further improvements around post-harvest management to enable farmers to undertake sorting and grading, and increased engagement with women and capacity building through farmer trainings and demo plot cultivation.