Multilateral Climate Funds Rarely Reach Vulnerable Communities – Can Inclusive Finance Service Providers Really Help?

Graham A N Wright

Group Managing Director, MicroSave Consulting (MSC)

Graham A.N. Wright founded MicroSave Consulting (MSC) and is currently its Group Managing Director. He has 35 years of development experience underpinned by five years of experience in management consultancy. He is a reformed Chartered Accountant. Graham has been deeply involved in digital financial services (DFS) since he supported M-PESA’s initial pilot-testing process. He has worked on DFS projects with governments, banks, fintechs, and telcos across Asia and Africa. These involved strategic planning, market research, product development, process analysis, agent network development, and marketing. Currently, Graham is leading MSC’s work on AI, climate change, locally-led adaptation, and agriculture; and how blended finance and DFS can play a catalytic role in these to enhance the resilience of climate-vulnerable communities. Graham is a regular speaker at conferences and has authored over 250 papers, blogs, and briefing notes, as well as an array of training materials on organizational development, DFS, and climate change.

Anju Sharma

Global Lead on Locally Led Adaptation, Global Center on Adaption

Anju Sharma is the Global Lead on Locally Led Adaptation at the Global Center on Adaptation. She is also an Associate with the Stockholm Environment Institute and a member of the Technical Committee of the Global Water Partnership. Anju has worked on climate change with Oxford Climate Policy, the European Capacity Building Initiative, and Oxfam GB in the UK; the UN Environment Programme in Kenya; and the Centre for Science and Environment in India. She has been a Visiting Fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development, and a consultant for several organizations, including the International Institute for Sustainable Development, University of Oxford, the secretariat of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the UN Development Program. She has written and edited several publications, including a Pocket Guide series for climate negotiators, UNEP’s Global Environment Outlook Yearbooks, GCA’s Stories of Resilience series, and books on natural resource management, pollution, and global environmental governance.

Peter Zetterli

Climate Lead, CGAP

Peter Zetterli is CGAP’s Climate Lead, spearheading the organization’s work on the intersection of climate change and financial inclusion. This high-priority body of work aims to maximize the impact of inclusive finance for climate action by developing more climate-relevant solutions for underserved clients as well as the financial institutions that serve them, preventing reversals of progress on financial inclusion as the risk and cost of serving people living in poverty grows due to climate change, and helping to make global climate finance more inclusive, empowering vulnerable populations to pursue their own strategies for climate adaptation, resilience, and a just transition. Peter previously led CGAP’s work on the future of financial services, focused on understanding what new business models are emerging from rapid technological innovation. He and his team has published extensively on the transformative potential of fintech, platforms, and digital banking models.

Rohini Kamal

Research Fellow, BRAC Institute of Governance and Development

Rohini is leading BIGD’s Environment and Climate Change research. She is also an Assistant Professor for the Master of Development Studies Programme at BIGD. Her research is on energy, environment, and climate change, using macroeconomic models to estimate employment and environmental interdependencies between different sectors of the economy. She also uses field experiments, including randomized controlled trials, to assess localized, household-level impacts of climatic changes and of programmatic, policy, and information interventions.    Dr. Kamal completed her PhD in Economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  Her last appointment was as a research fellow at the Global Development Policy Center at Boston University where she investigated the environmental and distributional impacts of energy financing. Prior to her doctoral studies, Dr Kamal worked at Urban Climate Change Research Network, a project under NASA/GISS and the Earth Institute.

Tita Alvira

Chief Partnerships and Programs Officer, Legado