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The report examines the intersection of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), noting that while BRI infrastructure investments can support AfCFTA goals, a lack of coordinated African strategy poses risks. It highlights China's incentive to access the AfCFTA's massive consumer market while warning that cheap Chinese imports could undermine the free trade area's objectives.

Cooking poverty affects 3.83 billion people across 71 countries, causing over four million deaths annually. The report argues that the current 'clean cooking' sector is fragmented and underfunded, with an annual funding gap of approximately $10 billion. It proposes a shift toward the term 'cooking poverty' to better reflect the scale of the crisis and suggests a 'Playbook' to centralize sector knowledge. Key recommendations include merging electrification and cooking efforts, utilizing carbon markets for small business finance, and adopting an incremental approach to transition households from unimproved to modern cooking.

The paper examines seven urban sustainability interventions in small and intermediary cities of the global South, focusing on disaster risk reduction, adaptation, emission reduction, and resource management. Using a framework to analyze actors and drivers, the study finds that the entities leading and financing projects significantly influence the inclusivity of the process and the resulting environmental framing. The analysis includes primary case studies from Nakuru, Kenya, and Udon Thani, Thailand.

The document argues that transport is a critical driver of development but a major source of emissions, accounting for 23% of energy-related CO2. It defines sustainable transport as safe, affordable, and efficient mobility that minimizes environmental impacts. The report details the evolution of international policy from the 1972 Stockholm Conference to the Sustainable Development Goals, and provides examples of successful interventions, such as Jakarta's BRT system and various cities' shifts toward active mobility (cycling and walking). It specifically notes the COVID-19 pandemic as a catalyst for structural changes in urban transit, though it warns that 30 major economies continue to provide significant subsidies to fossil fuels over clean energy.

The Green Climate Fund (GCF) emphasizes that advancing gender equality is critical for a climate-resilient future, as women are disproportionately affected by climate change yet act as key agents of change. The GCF mandates gender mainstreaming across all interventions through its Governing Instrument and Gender Policy, requiring every project to include a Gender Action Plan. The Fund has committed to providing $10 billion annually in support designed to optimize co-benefits between climate action and gender equality. Specific examples of this approach include supporting women-led agricultural enterprises in Ghana, argan tree cooperatives in Morocco, clean energy enterprises in Mongolia, and off-grid renewable energy SMEs in Kenya and Rwanda via the KawiSafi Ventures Fund.

The document outlines proposed amendments to two Isiolo County bills. For the Wildlife Management and Conservation Bill, it suggests expanding the definition of 'problem animal' for proactive conflict management, ensuring community nomination for the Board of Trustees, and protecting the land access rights of indigenous pastoralists. For the Community Conservancies Bill, it recommends adopting the 'community' definition from the Community Land Act 2016, introducing public access to information, and detailing meaningful community participation processes.

A coalition of civil society organizations is demanding that the World Bank fulfill promises of a participatory review for its Africa energy strategy. The signatories urge the Bank to prioritize renewable energy and energy access, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, while unequivocally ending financial support for fossil fuel-based development.

The document examines how climate change increases post-harvest losses in Kenya and Uganda through heightened pest and disease pressure, and proposes hermetic storage technologies (HSTs) as a solution to improve food security and farmer livelihoods.

The Youth Enterprise Grants (YEG) pilot project provided approximately $1,200 in cash and a smartphone to 1,018 youth in Mathare, Nairobi. The project found that mobile money transfers are highly feasible in urban slum environments and lead to a significant shift toward self-employment, with the proportion of youth working for themselves increasing from 37% to 79%. While smartphones enhanced market access and technical skill acquisition via the internet, specific business-management apps had limited take-up. Financial well-being improved markedly, with the percentage of recipients able to meet daily expenses rising from 28% to 82%. The report highlights a strong preference for grants over loans and an unmet demand for digital financial services that allow users to 'lock' or compartmentalise funds for saving.

The paper analyzes how international lending influences African countries' integration into global value chains. It finds that Chinese lending, which focuses heavily on transport and communication infrastructure, increases the overall intensity of GVC participation. In contrast, World Bank lending, which prioritizes social sectors like education and health, helps countries move toward higher value-added, upstream positions in production networks. The study emphasizes that reducing trade costs through infrastructure is key to initial GVC access, while human capital investments support economic upgrading.

The document analyzes the gap between the digital goals of the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) and the actual capacities of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Zambia. It argues that while paperless trade and 'single window' systems aim to increase efficiency, low literacy rates and language barriers (reliance on English) create 'SPS-Plus' burdens that exclude many small-scale traders. The author recommends integrating digital skills training and AI-powered translation of trade requirements into local languages to ensure SMEs can benefit from the energy and economic transition toward a digital economy.

The report details SEforALL's efforts over a 100-day period to accelerate the clean energy transition. Key activities include the launch of the 'Be Bold' campaign, coordination of the UN High-level Dialogue on Energy and its Energy Compacts, and supporting the COP26 Energy Transition Council. The organization also highlights research on sustainable cooling, a youth summit, and specific technical assistance for energy access in Nigeria and Sierra Leone, alongside a new healthcare electrification partnership with USAID and Power Africa.

The paper addresses a research gap in climate impact studies by moving beyond static, national-boundary-focused assessments to a futures-oriented framework for cross-border impacts. By combining global Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) with local drivers in a co-production process with stakeholders, the authors created "extended SSPs" to identify how climate impacts transmit across borders into Kenya and to explore adaptation activities to mitigate these global flows.

The document argues that agroecology, a science-based set of practices and social movement, offers a sustainable alternative to industrial agriculture, which accounts for up to 37% of global greenhouse gas emissions. It highlights that approximately 30% of global farms have already adopted agroecological principles, leading to increased crop yields, higher farmer incomes, and improved biodiversity. However, the briefing notes that scaling up these practices is hindered by governance and finance systems that heavily subsidize industrial agriculture, with only 1%-1.5% of agricultural and aid budgets currently supporting agroecological approaches. To overcome these barriers, the document recommends reorienting public funding, integrating agroecology into research and education, and increasing the participation of small-scale producers in food governance.

The document examines the digital divide's impact on climate practitioners in Africa, Asia, and South America, identifying barriers such as unreliable electricity and high data costs while highlighting the benefits of increased accessibility and reduced travel costs. It provides specific lessons from IPCC meetings and national processes in Kenya and Peru to improve inclusivity in virtual spaces.

In 2020, global coal-fired power capacity increased by 12.5 GW, driven primarily by China, which operated 38.4 GW of new capacity. This offset record closures in the US (11.3 GW) and EU27 (10.1 GW). While China's development grew as an economic stimulus during the pandemic, other Asian nations like Indonesia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and the Philippines announced plans to cancel up to 62 GW of planned projects due to falling renewable costs and financing difficulties. The report concludes that current global trajectories remain far from the 1.5°C warming limit, with approximately 1,350 GW of capacity needing to be cancelled or closed to meet IPCC targets.

The document provides a stocktaking of the e-commerce JSI negotiations among 86 WTO members, highlighting how the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated digital adoption while exacerbating the digital divide. It details the establishment of ten small negotiating groups to narrow differences on issues like consumer protection and spam, while noting persistent divergence on data flows and privacy. The brief also examines the separate WTO Work Programme on E-Commerce, specifically the contentious moratorium on customs duties on electronic transmissions, and the limited progress in addressing the needs of MSMEs, LDCs, and gender equality.

The Ethiopian Reconciliation Commission (ERC), established in 2019, faces significant operational and political hurdles that hinder its ability to implement substantive reconciliation activities. The report identifies a lack of clarity regarding the Commission's material and temporal mandates, an oversized and technically under-qualified membership, and a lack of independence and public trust. It recommends that the Ethiopian government revise the ERC's founding proclamation to specify its focus on gross human rights violations and recurrent conflicts, restructure the Commission to be leaner and more expert-led, and empower it to recommend reparations and conditional amnesties. Furthermore, the report emphasizes that the ERC's success depends on a conducive political environment fostered by an inclusive national dialogue.

Natural Justice submits a series of proposed amendments to the Wildlife Conservation and Management Act No. 47 of 2013. The organization argues for a 'human-rights approach to conservation' and the inclusion of 'access to information' and 'access to justice' as guiding principles. Key recommendations include establishing an external auditing authority for the wildlife service to prevent abuse of licensing powers, ensuring the inclusion of socially excluded groups (such as women, youth, and indigenous communities) in County Wildlife Conservation and Compensation Committees, and requiring that the declaration of protected areas incorporate local community traditional knowledge. The submission also highlights the need to protect wildlife migratory corridors from state-led and private development projects and calls for clearer guidelines on bioprospecting and the monitoring of offenses within private conservation systems.

The report 'The Landscape of Climate Finance in Kenya' analyzes climate finance flows in Kenya for 2018, comparing them against the financial requirements of the country's Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC). It finds a significant funding gap, with tracked finance meeting only one third of the annual need, and a misalignment between the high proportion of mitigation funding (primarily in renewable energy) and the country's adaptation-focused needs.