By Bolaji Ogunfemi
Between 2005 and 2024, climate-related disasters disrupted the schooling of 130 million children in Eastern and Southern Africa and caused US$1.3 billion in direct damage to education infrastructure. UNICEF and Dalberg put the resulting loss in lifetime earnings at up to US$140 billion, rising towards US$380 billion by 2050 if nothing changes. That is one sector, in one sub-region, over two decades. It is also the first regional attempt to price what climate change is doing to a generation’s prospects and the number should reframe how climate resilience in Africa is discussed. Adaptation is not a line item competing with development spending. It is development spending.
Africa contributes less than 4 per cent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. The asymmetry between what the continent emits and what it absorbs is well rehearsed. What receives less attention is the timing problem now emerging: the evidence base for action has never been stronger, while the financing architecture assumed by almost every UN adaptation strategy is shrinking.
What is actually happening to Africa’s climate?
The WMO State of the Climate in Africa 2024 provides the sharpest recent picture. Average surface temperature across the continent in 2024 sat roughly 0.86 °C above the 1991–2020 baseline, with North Africa warming fastest. Sea-surface temperatures reached record highs, and marine heatwaves covered nearly 30 million km² between January and April, the largest area since monitoring began in 1993.
The agricultural consequences were immediate. Aggregate cereal yields in southern Africa fell 16 per cent below the five-year average; Zambia lost 43 per cent and Zimbabwe 50 per cent. Low water levels at Lake Kariba, Africa’s largest man-made reservoir, cut hydropower output and produced prolonged outages across two economies.
Flooding did comparable damage at the other extreme. Heavy long rains from March to May affected more than 700,000 people in Kenya, Tanzania and Burundi. In West and Central Africa, floods affected over four million people, with several hundred deaths and hundreds of thousands displaced — Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Cameroon and the Central African Republic worst hit.
One continent, one year, both tails of the distribution.
Why is the development response falling behind?
The 2024 Africa Sustainable Development Report, produced jointly by UNDP, the UN Economic Commission for Africa, the African Union Commission and the African Development Bank, found that fewer than 6 per cent of the 32 measurable SDG targets it reviewed are on track for 2030. Those targets cover poverty, hunger, climate action, peaceful societies and global partnerships. The report is explicit that progress on climate action (SDG 13) is trending negatively, and that weak national statistical systems make performance on governance targets difficult even to measure.
That last point deserves more weight than it usually gets. A country that cannot measure its exposure cannot cost its adaptation needs, and a country that cannot cost its needs cannot make a credible claim on international climate finance. Data capacity is not a technical afterthought. It is a precondition for access to money.
Who bears the cost?
Vulnerability in Africa is unevenly distributed along lines that are already familiar to social policy analysts: age, gender, displacement status and geography.
Children carry a disproportionate share. In the Comoros, UNICEF reports that 54 per cent of Comorian children live in areas exposed to at least four major environmental risks. The response, the Climate Action for the Last Mile initiative, run with the Korea International Cooperation Agency and the Comorian government, integrates adaptation into schools, health facilities and water systems, with young people organised through a Young Climate Champions network. It is a useful model precisely because it treats resilience as a property of ordinary public services rather than a standalone programme.
Displaced populations are similarly concentrated in harm’s way. UNHCR’s Focus Area Strategic Plan for Climate Action 2024–2030 records that 84 per cent of refugees and asylum seekers fled from highly climate-vulnerable countries in 2022, up from 61 per cent in 2010. The plan identifies 22 countries of particular concern and sets objectives across protection, solutions, resilience and adaptation.
Gender runs through both. UN Women’s toolkit on financing gender equality in the green transition in sub-Saharan Africa has been used to train policymakers across twenty countries, and the results are visible in national commitments. Liberia’s revised NDC targets a 64 per cent emissions reduction by 2035 and pledges 20 per cent of all climate finance to women-led cooperatives, smallholder farmers and entrepreneurs. That is a costed, auditable commitment rather than a statement of intent and the standard other NDCs should be held to.
What are UN agencies proposing?
UNEP’s Africa office frames NDC implementation as a route to food security, youth enterprise and economic expansion rather than as an environmental obligation, and convenes ministries through the Ecosystem-based Adaptation for Food Security Assembly, established in 2016 by African environment ministers.
WHO’s Regional Office for Africa, with the Africa Enterprise Challenge Fund, has designed blended financing models that combine public and private capital for climate-resilient health systems, with technical input from the Adaptation Fund and delegates from Benin, Burkina Faso, Uganda and Zimbabwe.
UNESCO focuses on the resource base. Africa has over 30,000 km of coastline and river basins covering 64 per cent of its land area, assets central to Agenda 2063 and the African Blue Economy Strategy, and increasingly stressed by sea-level rise, pollution and over-abstraction.
Three lines of work stand out.
The financing contradiction
Here is the difficulty. Every strategy above assumes a functioning international financing environment. That assumption is now questionable.
WFP expects to receive roughly 40 per cent less funding than in 2024, a projected budget of US$6.4 billion against US$10 billion. In West and Central Africa alone, 55 million people are projected to face crisis-level hunger during the June–August 2026 lean season, with over three million at emergency level, double the 2020 figure. Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon and Niger account for 77 per cent of that caseload.
The evidence in Mali is instructive: areas where rations were reduced saw acute hunger rise 64 per cent since 2023, while areas receiving full rations recorded a 34 per cent fall. Assistance works. It is being withdrawn anyway.
So the honest reading is this. African governments are being asked to build resilience at precisely the moment external financing contracts, and the recommendation to “mobilise international climate finance” is becoming weaker advice each year. Domestic resource mobilisation, regional pooling and rigorous prioritisation are no longer supplementary options.
Afrodevelopment’s priorities
- Treat adaptation as core public expenditure, not a donor project. Resilience should be built into education, health and water budgets since the sectors the UNICEF loss-and-damage analysis shows are already absorbing the costs.
- Fix the measurement problem first. Weak statistical systems block both policy design and finance access. Investment in national statistical offices and meteorological services has a higher return than most single adaptation projects.
- Cost and audit gender commitments. Liberia’s 20 per cent climate finance pledge to women-led enterprises is the benchmark: specific, quantified, checkable.
- Prioritise ruthlessly under contraction. With WFP funding falling sharply, governments and partners need explicit triage criteria rather than proportional cuts across programmes.
- Build blended finance capacity now. The WHO–AECF model deserves replication, but it requires public-sector skills in structuring instruments that most health ministries currently lack.
- Protect regional water and coastal governance. Transboundary basins covering 64 per cent of the continent cannot be managed nationally; regional bodies need mandates and budgets, not communiqués.
Conclusion
Climate resilience in Africa is now a fiscal question as much as an environmental one. The science is settled enough to act on, the vulnerability mapping is good enough to target, and the institutional models exist. What is thinning is the money and the strategies drafted in 2024 have not yet caught up with that. The next generation of national adaptation plans will be judged on whether they are honest about that constraint or continue to budget for a level of external support that is no longer arriving.
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