African Development Bank Group’s Evaluation Week 2026

15 –17 June 2026 | 09:00 ET to 12:00 ET | Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire

On 17 June 2026, the Evidence for Climate Action (E4CA) initiative joined the African Development Bank’s Development Evaluation Week 2026 for the session “Evidence for Climate Action in Africa – Scaling What Works Across Borders.” The session brought together climate and evaluation experts from African and international development institutions to examine what evaluative evidence tells us about moving from climate commitments to effective delivery and scaling solutions across countries and institutions.

Opening the session, Dr. Sven Harten of DEval connected the discussion to the wider E4CA initiative and the need to bring evidence closer to climate decision-making. In his keynote address, Dr. Kevin Kariuki, AfDB Vice President for Power, Energy, Climate and Green Growth, challenged the prevailing narrative of Africa primarily as a victim of climate change, emphasizing instead the continent’s growing role as a solutions-driven climate actor. He highlighted African-led approaches to adaptation, clean energy, climate-risk financing and resilience, while stressing that commitments must be matched by stronger implementation systems, institutional capacity and credible evidence.

The two panel discussions brought together a rich range of evaluative evidence and institutional experience. The first, moderated by Monojeet Pal of the African Development Bank, featured Garrett Kilroy of the Asian Development Bank, Maria Fernanda Rodrigo of the Inter-American Development Bank, and Robert Ochieng Mugabe of the African Development Bank. The second, moderated by Samer Hachem of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, brought together Sithabiso Gandure of the Adaptation Fund, Neeraj Neegi and Rasec Niembro of the Global Environment Facility, Lauren Kelly of the World Bank Group, and Joseph Mouanda of Independent Development Evaluation at the African Development Bank.

Drawing on evidence from their respective institutions, the panelists converged on an important message: meeting climate-finance targets is not, in itself, evidence of climate impact. The real measure of success is whether investments strengthen resilience, protect livelihoods, create jobs and opportunities, and generate sustainable improvements in people’s lives. The discussions also underscored the importance of stronger institutional capacity, continuous learning, robust climate data, and long-term, country-led approaches to achieving these outcomes.

The session generated the following key takeaways on how evaluative evidence can strengthen climate action, improve implementation, and support the scaling of effective solutions across Africa:

1. Climate interventions must be designed with scalability in mind from the outset. Successful climate pilots do not automatically achieve large-scale impact. Scaling requires deliberate planning, enabling policies, institutional support, sustainable financing, partnerships, and knowledge-sharing. Evaluations should therefore assess not only whether a project is effective, but also whether it is designed and capable of being replicated, adapted, and expanded in different contexts.
2. Strong institutions, local ownership, and implementation capacity are fundamental to achieving sustainable climate outcomes. Strong institutional capacity is essential for lasting climate impact. Climate initiatives are more sustainable when they are integrated into government systems, backed by local ownership, and supported by long-term institutional and financial capacity rather than temporary project structures or external expertise.
3. Evaluations must move beyond project-level outputs to assess system-level transformation and long-term resilience. Climate evaluations should move beyond measuring short-term outputs to assess long-term, system-wide transformation. They need to capture how interventions influence institutions, ecosystems, livelihoods, and resilience, and whether they create sustainable change beyond the life of a project.
4. Equity and inclusion must be at the center of climate evaluations and climate action. Evaluations should go beyond measuring environmental outcomes to understand who benefits, who bears the cost, and whether some groups (women, youth, smallholder farmers, marginalized communities) may be harmed as programs scale. Combining participatory approaches with mixed methods from the outset provides a more complete picture of climate impacts and helps ensure that interventions deliver equitable and lasting benefits.
5. Regional cooperation and cross-border learning are essential for addressing climate challenges that transcend national boundaries. Climate change does not stop at national borders, and neither should the solutions. Regional cooperation allows countries to pool expertise, coordinate investments, and tackle shared challenges more effectively. Evaluative evidence plays a key role in identifying successful regional models and facilitating the transfer of lessons across countries and institutions.
6. Better measurement, learning, and evidence use are critical for accelerating climate action. Robust monitoring, evaluation, and learning systems are needed not only for accountability but also to identify what works, why it works, and under what conditions, to inform policy and investment decisions, and scale successful climate solutions.

The session reinforced the message that Africa already has a growing body of evidence and experience on climate solutions. The priority now is to use that evidence more systematically to strengthen implementation, learn faster, and scale what works.