ACCRA, Ghana and CHICAGO, IL, February 2023 – As part of the Connecting Climate Entrepreneurs (CCE) initiative, the US Department of State’s Office of Global Partnerships launched a Partnership Opportunity Delegation (POD) to Accra, Ghana to cultivate partnership and stimulate new collaborations between the U.S. private sector and the West African climate capital domain. The delegation included leaders from Telesto Strategy, Google, Tides Foundation, Arm, USTDA, Amazon Web Services, and LinkedIn, among others. With facilitation by the Department of State and U.S. Embassy in Accra, delegates were introduced to leaders from Ghana’s public and private sectors and met with climate innovators.

In collaboration with the delegation event, Telesto Strategy hosted a convening of Ghanian and U.S leaders from across the public, private, university, and non-profit arenas for a dinner and panel discussion. Along with delegation members, some of the attendees included representatives from Scale Up Africa, UBA Group, Impact Hub, Development Bank Ghana, Norfund, Academic City University College, and Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs.

Telesto’s Managing Director, . The panel featured Charmaine Hayden, Funds Manager, GOODsoil Venture Capital; Thomas Debass, Managing Director, Office of Global Partnerships, U.S. Department of State; Olamide Oguntoye, Policy Lead, Science & Innovation Unit, Tony Blair Institute; and John Boateng Akuoko-Tawiah, Head – ESG, Sustainability and Climate Finance, Development Bank of Ghana. “We are fortunate to be joined by practitioners with such deep expertise from the intersection of climate and finance,” Andrew said, “Bringing these kinds of voices together has made for an extremely rich discussion and paves the way to further build a robust climate finance ecosystem.”

The panel engaged in a generative discussion on solutions to the lack of climate investment in Ghana. In 2019-2020, Ghana received only $830 million in climate investments, far below the $1.55 billion per year needed to address mitigation and adaptation requirements set out in the Nationally Determined Contribution as part of the Paris Agreement. To address this discrepancy, the panel considered collaborative remedies like building a pipeline of investable projects for investors to access, encouraging ESG readiness among Ghanaian businesses, and continuing to reduce the perceived risk of investing in African countries for investors through risk mitigation and innovative mechanisms.

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