Request for Proposals (RFP 2024-018) Readiness Support and Project Preparation Facility Service Providers

The Green Climate Fund (“GCF” or the “Fund”) is a multilateral fund established with the purpose of making a significant and ambitious contribution to the global efforts towards attaining the goals set by the international community to combat climate change. In the context of sustainable development, the Fund will promote a paradigm shift towards low-emission and climate-resilient development pathways by providing support to developing countries to limit or reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to the impacts of climate change.

GCF is an international organization headquartered in Songdo, Incheon City, Republic of Korea and is an operating entity of the financial mechanism of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (“UNFCCC”). It is governed and supervised by a Board that has responsibility for funding decisions pursuant to the Governing Instrument for the Green Climate Fund (“Governing Instrument”). It is supported by an independent Secretariat, accountable to the Board, having management capabilities to execute day-to-day operations of GCF, providing administrative, legal and financial expertise.

Through this Request for Proposals (RFP), the GCF intends to establish a pre-qualified pool of Readiness Support and Project Preparation Facility (PPF) service providers*, categorized into lots based on their specific areas of expertise. The GCF will contract these providers through non-exclusive Long-Term Agreements (LTAs). The initial contract period will be three (3) years, with an option to extend for an additional two (2) years, subject to satisfactory performance, as further specified in the Terms of Reference provided in Annex 1.

The goal of this process is to improve the speed and efficiency with which GCF can procure a suitably qualified Delivery Partners (DPs) and Project Preparation Facility service providers (PPFs), capable of delivering tangible results and impactful outcomes that align with countries’ priorities, the 2024-2027 readiness strategy objectives, and the GCF’s 2024-2027 Strategic Plan.

The Readiness Programme was operationalised as GCF’s first active form of financing in 2014, with objectives and activities focused on preparing national designated authorities (NDAs) and/or focal points to access GCF during its early stages of operationalisation. Since then, readiness support has been instrumental in laying the foundations not only for engaging with GCF, but also in the broader context of financing climate action. Countries have been supported through the Readiness Programme in setting up institutional structures dedicated to climate finance, enabling country-wide coordination for climate action, building policy and regulatory frameworks, and yielding early climate programming results. Building upon the momentum gained throughout the years of the Readiness Programme operation and recognising that countries’ capacities are progressively strengthening and deepening, the Readiness Programme must harness the foundations it has laid and evolve to a more advanced level when addressing capacity-building needs and gaps.

To this effect, the 2024-2027 readiness strategy has been revised to significantly enhance its support for developing countries, specifically through strategic planning and requesting readiness support; and by focusing on direct access programming, and better, faster and more predictable access to GCF resources. It outlines two distinct financing modalities, namely:

• Country support modality. Countries have access to up to USD 7 million over four years for integrated planning and implementation of adaptation and mitigation measures. This includes USD 4 million per country over a four-year period to support an integrated approach to adaptation and mitigation related readiness support, in addition to the previously available USD 3 million for supporting National Adaptation Plan (NAP) formulation (NAP.1), which remains accessible to countries that have not yet fully utilised these funds[1]. Furthermore, Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are eligible for an additional support of up to USD 320,000 over four years, to cater for their specific challenges around human and institutional capacities when engaging with GCF.
• Direct Access Entity (DAE) support modality. Accredited DAEs as well as candidate DAEs in the advanced stages of the accreditation process have access to USD 1 million per entity over 4 years.

Both modalities are accessed to fulfil the three objectives of the 2024-2027 strategy, namely:

• Objective 1: Capacity-building for climate finance coordination and setting up the enabling environment for integrated climate investment.
• Objective 2: Paradigm-shifting GCF pipeline development and implementation for adaptation and mitigation, based on country needs and guided by USP-2 programming targets.
• Objective 3: Knowledge sharing and learning to enhance national and regional cooperation on climate programming and financing.

Each objective has a set number of GCF Board-approved outcomes (see below) that the readiness support will target in 2024-2027 through a wide range of activities defined for four years based on systems thinking. This ‘systems thinking’ approach aims to avoid a piecemeal strategy (grants addressing specific issues) and instead promotes requests for readiness support within a clear progression path, which starts with the four-year planning over 20024-2027. This path involves exploring capacity gaps, barriers, and their interactions and relationships, all aimed at assisting countries in transitioning from a baseline state to the envisioned outcome of being equipped to formulate and execute their top-priority climate initiatives and national climate strategies.

[1] Additionally, countries can access up to USD 3 million for NAP implementation (NAP.2), provided that the main USD 7 million envelope has less than USD 250,000 remaining in committed funds

* Readiness Support refers to capacity-building and technical assistance provided to countries and entities under the GCF’s Readiness and Preparatory Support Programme, aligned with the 2024-2027 readiness strategy. Please note that this may be subject to amendment due to the long-term nature of the LTA.