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The document presents findings from the Gender Equality in a Low Carbon World (GLOW) program, demonstrating how gender-responsive business models in agriculture and aquaculture improve productivity and market access. It highlights specific successes in Kenya, Senegal, Rwanda, and Nicaragua, while urging impact investors and public funders to adopt gender-lens investment strategies to support the energy transition.

The document outlines how gender-responsive approaches—identifying barriers for women and promoting their leadership—enhance the efficiency of climate-smart technologies in agriculture and aquaculture. Drawing on the GLOW programme (2021–2024), it provides evidence from Africa and Central America showing that empowering women leads to higher yields, better market access, and increased attractiveness for impact investors.

The report argues that climate action and gender equality are synergistic and must be integrated to achieve a just transition. Based on 12 projects in 17 countries, it identifies four axes for empowerment: improving productivity of existing activities, helping women enter male-dominated sectors, consolidating low-carbon business plans, and providing access to new green technologies. Key findings highlight that women's traditional knowledge is often inherently low-carbon and that removing discriminatory barriers—such as limited land rights and social norms—can accelerate climate resilience and economic growth. The document provides specific recommendations for policymakers to integrate gender-sensitive budgeting and support women's leadership in sectors like regenerative agriculture, the blue economy, and ecotourism.

The GLOW program demonstrates that gender equality and climate action are synergistic, arguing that women's leadership and participation are essential for the effectiveness and sustainability of low-carbon transitions. Through projects in the Global South, the report identifies four pathways for empowerment: improving the productivity of existing women's economic activities via climate-smart methods, integrating women into traditionally male-dominated value chains, consolidating low-carbon business models, and creating entirely new green jobs using emerging technologies. Key findings highlight that women often possess traditional knowledge that is inherently low-carbon and that emerging technologies, such as solar irrigation and circular bioeconomy tools (e.g., black soldier fly farming), can reduce servile labor and lower barriers to entry for women. The report recommends integrating gender-transformative policies into National Determined Contributions (NDCs), increasing women's access to productive assets and digital markets, and addressing the disproportionate burden of unpaid care work as a core component of climate action.

The GLOW programme identifies four primary routes for simultaneous women's empowerment and climate action: improving existing activities, enabling entry into male-dominated sectors, consolidating low-carbon business models, and accessing new green technologies. Key findings emphasize that climate action must be rights-based and locally appropriate, as social norms significantly shape women's ability to adopt new practices. The report argues that women's leadership in decision-making and access to productive assets are essential for the effectiveness and sustainability of just transitions. It recommends integrating gender-responsive budgeting, strengthening the gender capacity of local government personnel, and promoting technologies that reduce the drudgery of unpaid care work.

The briefing highlights the negative environmental and social impacts of critical mineral extraction in Argentina, Indonesia, and Guinea, arguing that the UN Secretary-General's Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals must center the voices of affected communities to avoid 'green extractivism'. It documents issues such as the violation of Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) in lithium mining, pollution and labor abuses in nickel downstreaming, and the loss of agricultural land in bauxite mining. The document concludes with recommendations for governments and companies to protect indigenous rights, ensure transparency in GHG emissions, and end the criminalization of environmental defenders.

The Stockholm Environment Institute and the FAO have developed a WEAP PlugIn that allows for the calculation of water stress at the sub-basin level rather than just on a country-wide basis. By disaggregating data, water resource managers can better visualize spatial variations in water stress and test the impact of different management strategies, such as reducing canal losses or accounting for population growth. The tool uses the Flow Duration Curve (FDC) Shift method to incorporate environmental flow requirements into its calculations. The briefing demonstrates the tool's application using the Senegal River basin and lists recommendations for its implementation in other basins.

The report evaluates five small, locally led grants funded by the Scottish government to address loss and damage (L&D). It argues that while small grants are limited in scale and duration, they are essential for rapid action, capacity building, and piloting human rights-based approaches. Key findings emphasize the need to bridge the gap between L&D and adaptation, prioritize 'trapped' populations in migration support, and shift from rigid output-based monitoring to trust-based, outcome-oriented partnerships grounded in climate justice.

The SCPZ programme targets the Kara region in Togo, the Southern agropole in Senegal, and the Boké and Kankan regions in Guinea. It integrates climate adaptation and mitigation by investing in solar-powered drip irrigation, biogas energy for agro-processing, and climate-resilient agricultural (CRA) practices. The project aims to benefit 6.72 million people, with a strong focus on women, and expects to reduce 16.9 million tCO2eq over its lifespan.

The report details the southward expansion of JNIM into Mali's Kayes and Koulikoro regions, where the group has significantly increased violence and fatalities since 2021. JNIM leverages illicit activities—including zakat taxation, cattle rustling, and the control of timber logging in the Baoulé forest—to fund its operations and gain local influence. The group further exploits social cleavages, such as farmer-herder conflicts and the persistence of hereditary slavery, to recruit members and undermine state authority. While the Malian government and its Wagner partners have made gains elsewhere, security forces in the south are described as overstretched and under-resourced, with varying levels of community trust.

The document analyzes the 'epidemic' of military takeovers in Africa, identifying governance dysfunction, democratic decline, civil-military tensions, and Islamist insurgencies as primary drivers. It argues that the African Union (AU) and regional economic communities (RECs) have relied on reactive, inconsistent, and ineffective blanket sanctions that fail to deter coup plotters. The author recommends a shift toward prevention, targeted sanctions, and the strengthening of civil-military relations and democratic legitimacy.

The report examines the social and environmental risks associated with the surge in demand for transition minerals like nickel, lithium, and cobalt. It criticizes current IFI approaches, such as the World Bank's 'climate-smart mining,' for treating environmental and social governance (ESG) as commercial risks rather than human rights imperatives. Through case studies in Indonesia, Guinea, Argentina, and the DRC, the document illustrates harms including forced evictions, water scarcity, and corruption. It proposes solutions centered on reducing mineral demand through circular economy models, implementing binding due diligence, and supporting mineral sovereignty for resource-rich countries in the Global South.

The Staple Crops Processing Zone (SCPZ) programme aims to transform agricultural value chains in Togo, Senegal, and Guinea by integrating climate-resilient production with low-carbon processing. The project focuses on four regions: Kara in Togo, the Southern agropole in Senegal, and Boké and Kankan in Guinea. It combines adaptation measures, such as solar-powered drip irrigation and climate-resilient agriculture (CRA), with mitigation efforts, including biogas digesters and agroforestry. The programme targets 1.104 million direct beneficiaries and 5.612 million indirect beneficiaries, with a strong emphasis on women's empowerment. Total financing is USD 271.70 million, with USD 102.79 million requested from the GCF as a mix of grants and loans.

The report by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) examines the status of Pterocarpus erinaceus (rosewood) trade in West Africa following a March 2022 CITES trade suspension. While international trafficking has slowed, the authors find that illegal logging persists in countries like Mali, Ghana, the Gambia, and Nigeria, often facilitated by corrupt officials. The report specifically criticizes Sierra Leone's request to export 160,000 cubic meters of stockpiled timber without a sustainable export quota and Mali's approved Non-Detriment Finding (NDF), which the authors claim is based on outdated or biased data and ignores critical environmental pressures. The document concludes that lifting the suspension for any country would undermine regional conservation efforts and risk a return to unsustainable 'boom and bust' logging cycles.

The document assesses the impact of gender analyses on National Adaptation Plan (NAP) processes in nine countries, identifying how these tools influence policy, knowledge, collaboration, and investment. It highlights that while gender analyses often lead to the creation of specific gender-climate strategies and the integration of gender-disaggregated data into NAPs, their effectiveness depends on high-level political ownership, inclusive stakeholder participation, and continuous dissemination of results.

The report identifies systemic barriers to gender equality in the off-grid solar (OGS) sector across sixteen Sub-Saharan African countries, highlighting a critical lack of sex-disaggregated data and the prevalence of restrictive social norms. It finds that women generally have less access to OGS technologies and are underrepresented in technical and leadership roles within the workforce. To address these gaps, the Hardest-to-Reach (H2R) initiative proposes a strategy focused on elevating women as customers, employees, and entrepreneurs through gender-lens investing, technical assistance for portfolio companies, and dedicated training facilities.

The report finds that despite robust anti-money laundering policies, there are few criminal investigations into the financial proceeds of migrant smuggling in Senegal and Sierra Leone. Smugglers rely heavily on cash and informal transfer systems like hawala to move funds, which are then laundered through real estate, used car imports, and hospitality businesses. Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs) in both countries are underfunded and lack the specialized capacity to 'follow the money,' while corruption and a lack of witness cooperation further hinder prosecutions.

The "Hardest-to-Reach" (H2R) programme aims to provide clean, climate-resilient off-grid solar (OGS) energy to 72.4 million people across 16 sub-Saharan African countries. The initiative utilizes a two-pronged financing approach: a $50 million grant-funded Market Support Facility (MSF) to support market entry and capacity building for new players, and a $200 million blended finance Market Expansion Facility (MEF) providing impact-linked loans to scale existing OGS companies. The programme targets a mitigation outcome of 5.1 million tCO2eq avoided and an adaptation outcome of 54.3 million first-time energy access beneficiaries. It emphasizes gender inclusivity, targeting 32% female customers and creating approximately 13,922 green jobs, including 4,641 for women.

The author argues that German-African health cooperation remains shaped by colonial legacies and prioritizes European security and economic interests over African public health needs. While the German government promotes a multilateral approach and supports institutions like the WHO and Africa CDC, the author highlights a 'securitization' of health that marginalizes the poor and protects the privileged. Key tensions include the 'Triple-Win' nursing recruitment program, which may drain health systems in origin countries, and the BioNTech mRNA plant in Rwanda, which operates outside the WHO-led technology transfer hub. The paper calls for a shift toward a decolonial framework based on humility, historical justice, and a shared responsibility for global public goods, including climate-related health financing.

The African Development Bank (AfDB) has disclosed the Environmental and Social Management System (ESMS) for the LEAF Risk Sharing Facility with the African Guarantee Fund (AGF). The subproject, categorized as FI-B/I-2, provides guarantees to Distributed Renewable Energy (DRE) portfolios. Because local financial intermediaries and DRE companies are not yet determined, no project-specific ESIA or ESMP is required; instead, the AGF E&S Framework will guide future due diligence. Disclosure of the ESMS occurred on 29 May 2023, and the AfDB confirmed that AGF's system is compliant with its Integrated Safeguards System (ISS).