In November 2020, the Climate Change and International Cooperation Division (CCICD) of the Ministry of Economy, which is Fiji’s National Designated Authority (NDA) to the Green Climate Fund (GCF), established four thematic climate finance Sector Working Groups (SWGs):

• SWG 1 – Sustainable Livelihoods and Healthy Communities
• SWG 2 – Ecosystems and Ecosystem Services and Sustainable Resource Management
• SWG 3 – Climate Resilient Infrastructure, Sustainable Energy and Built Environment
• SWG 4 – Sustainable Transport

The SWG are part of a double-pronged proactive approach by the CCICD to ensure stakeholders are well informed of processes, requirements and capacity development initiatives relating to accessing climate financing via the GCF (as well as other sources) and have an opportunity to provide feedback and inputs to the work of the NDA. The second element of this approach is an online NDA Portal (under development) to disseminate information and documents and share updates on training sessions and other relevant events.

The SWGs include stakeholders from the public and private sectors, including ministries, government agencies and statutory authorities, industry associations, businesses, NGOs, CSOs and academia with two types of membership: consultative (by invitation of the NDA) and open (application by Expression of Interest – see below to apply).

The consultative SWGs met in February and April 2021 to provide comments and feedback to the NDA on the No-Objection Procedures for the GCF as well as the process for appraisal of concept notes submitted to the NDA and intended for financing from the GCF. In July 2021, the 3rd SWGs consultative meeting was held as an online Webinar due to the covid-19 restrictions. The main purpose of this consultative meeting was to engage with stakeholders for inputs for the design of the upcoming NDA Portal. Different hands-on online activities were prepared to collect and consolidate relevant elements of the NDA Portal homepage. This was an opportunity to explore and identify user needs and information needs as part of the NDA Portal user research to inform the portal development.  Overall, the SWG NDA Portal webinar inputs add much value and guidance to the NDA Portal development.