Module 4 Resources

Welcome to the Module

This module focuses on the various steps involved in successfully implementing a GCF project. A successful GCF project requires a strong foundation of economic and financial modelling, to show the project’s impacts and returns. This module will help you to understand how to design a project that can be successfully implemented. It will take you through project budgets (including guidelines for developing your budget), monitoring and reporting in project management, and project exit strategies.

By the end of this module you will be able to:

• LO1: Understand and conduct financial and economic modelling.

• LO2: Develop a project budget.

• LO3: Explain and describe the tools for executing, monitoring and reporting in project management, including for accounting for ESS and gender.

• LO5: Explain project exit strategies and develop these for a project.

4.1 | Financial and economic modelling

This section covers financial and economic modelling. It will take you through how to use the financial model to develop a strong financial rationale that communicates your project’s returns on investment, as well as an economic model which will explain how your project will achieve the returns on financial investment.

These two models will enable you to assess the viability of your project/programme and mobilize the necessary resources from GCF, your organisation/AEs, governments, financial institutions, project sponsors and/or other co-financiers.

This next video will cover the financial and economic modelling aspects of project proposals. On the financial side, it will highlight the need for a strong financial rationale that shows returns on investment.

On the economic side, it will explain how to show your returns on financial investment. Returns on investment can include climate change impacts and co-benefits (social, environmental). It is critical that you are able to monitor these throughout your project.

This video will also explain how economic modelling can happen at different scales in a project, from SDGs to livelihoods.

4.2 | Project budgets

This section will assist you in developing a budget. The Logframe developed in Module 2.5 will help in your understanding of the components and activities of your project, as well as the resources required to complete them. You need to ensure that you budget sufficiently for project management activities and stakeholder engagement.

In this section, we will run through the GCF budget template, what to include, what not to include, how to determine rates for consultants and disbursements for both consultants and project developers.

This video will take you through the process of how to develop a budget including how to incorporate a detailed cost breakdown and disbursements. It will help you to identify when and how you develop a full financial model, the different financing instruments available and how you can identify the appropriate financing instrument for your project.

4.3 | Monitoring and reporting in project management

This section looks at monitoring and evaluation (M&E) as part of the project management role in your project. Monitoring and evaluation have different functions: monitoring must ensure that both project implementers and funders have information to assess whether activities and outputs will deliver against set indicators; evaluation must allow for a systematic and objective assessment of the project at specified stages to investigate whether the activities and outputs have achieved the desired impacts.

This video will introduce you to project monitoring and reporting. Often M&E is poorly set up and consequently, makes it difficult to know what the project is actually delivering. Through understanding M&E, this video will teach you how to show value for money by capturing and reporting on co-benefits.

The video will then introduce the concept of an M&E framework and its key features, namely: setting indicators against the different project outputs, making links to the logframe, highlighting where your project is contributing to change and evaluating progress towards achieving this, and managing risk.

4.4 Project exit strategies

Section 4.4 discusses project exit strategies. To achieve a paradigm shift and contribute to the creation of an enabling environment, the long-term sustainability of the project must be ensured. Most projects are not a once-off fix, but rather, a continuous process, empowering communities, local authorities, entrepreneurs, activists, government representatives and technical analysts to continue with the project beyond the project cycle.

This video will take you through the process of how to establish stakeholder involvement and how to involve stakeholders in a constructive and effective way. It will also take you through the key elements, which include a sustainability strategy, of how to ensure that your project is self-sustaining and will continue beyond the lifecycle of the project. This video will end off with a mining sector example to solidify this process and strategy.