However efforts to combat climate change offer Africa an opportunity to accelerate solutions to the above by focusing actions on catalytic sectors. These are sectors/sub-sectors in which Africa holds a comparative advantage in resources, are economically inclusive and can unlock leading socioeconomic priorities in most countries in the continent – especially achieving food security, creation of income & job opportunities and expansion of macroeconomic growth - simultaneously with enhancing ecosystems and offsetting carbon to meet climate objectives under the Paris Agreement. Hence accelerate achieving the SDGs in the continent.

Going forward, the continent urgently needs to foster policy & non-policy investments to maximize productivity of these catalytic sectors for solutions that will accelerate socioeconomic transformation and EBAFOSA aims to mobilize these investments. Amalgamating on-farm Ecosystems Based Adaptation (EBA) Driven Agriculture with clean energy to power value addition & processing and efficient linkage to markets and supply chains presents a potential catalytic area for Africa targeted by EBAFOSA.

The amalgamation is meant to maximize productivity of agriculture by cutting on postharvest losses, losses due to climate change & losses due to ecosystems degradation. And also maximize productivity of clean energy development by diversifying application beyond traditional domestic use to include productive use in agro-processing and value addition. And in the process, maximize income & job opportunities simultaneously with offsetting carbon & enhancing ecosystems given that clean & sustainable approaches are used. Hence unlock multiple SDGs.

Policy & Operational investments to upscale this thrust to being the norm in policy & practice across the continent is needed for impacts across the continent. For this, EBAFOSA is leveraging on the following investments as the key enabling pillars: