A closer look at what it takes to move a climate or energy project from an idea into something a bank, a fund, or an investor is ready to back. 

Most people encounter a climate or energy project only once it's already running, generating power, or delivering the result it was built for. What rarely makes it into that story is everything that happened before it, the long stretch when a good idea was still just an idea, and someone somewhere was doing the quiet, unremarkable work of making it real, financial close included. 

This is an attempt to show some of that work directly, through the people who did it. Ten short conversations with the developers who built these projects, and the UNDP country teams who worked alongside them across Africa. Each one was asked a handful of honest questions and answered them without a script.

What sits behind a project 

Two of UNDP Rome Centre's main channels for this kind of work are the Platform for Investment Support and Technical Assistance, known as PISTA, and Energy for Growth in Africa. Both programmes work from the same basic premise, that a strong project and the financing able to support it don't always reach each other without help along the way. PISTA and Energy for Growth in Africa exist to provide that help, working with a project on one side and with potential financiers on the other, until the two are in a position to meet. 

What that support actually involves changes depending on what a project needs at a given stage, sometimes proving that something is technically sound enough to survive real scrutiny, other times building the regulatory groundwork a project needs before a serious conversation with a financier becomes possible. What tends to stay consistent, across very different projects and countries, is how closely our support stays involved as those needs continue to change. 

What that support looks like in practice doesn’t really repeat itself. It's shaped by what a specific project needs at a specific moment, not by a fixed process applied the same way each time. 

What follows are ten accounts of that work, told directly by the people who worked on it.