Friday morning, 14 November, at the 14th Cities & Regions Hub, during the official COP30 Presidency event organised by FMDV, The Urban Finance Engine: Country Platforms for Localizing Finance powered by NDBs & SDBs, a clear message emerged: countries are ready to build national architectures that finally make climate finance work for cities and regions.
And one of the strongest signals came from Cameroon.
For 15 years, FMDV – Global Fund for Cities Development – has worked with its members, partners and governments to advance one of the most persistent gaps in development and climate finance: how to build the systems that allow cities and regions to access the capital they need.
During this time, FMDV has contributed concepts, instruments and policy frameworks that today appear in key global agendas. It also hosts two major coalitions shaping the future of subnational finance:
- the AMUF Alliance of African Ministers for Urbanization Financing, gathering over 35 governments, including 23 signatories of the Abidjan Declaration;
- the Global Alliance of Subnational Development Banks (SDBs), uniting more than 80 members (including 27 NDBs/SDBs from its African branch and 29 in the Latin America and the Caribbean one)
At COP30 in Belém, this long-term advocacy translated into a concrete and country-owned milestone: the public announcement of the Finance Your Cities Cameroon, a Country Platform for Localizing Finance (CPLF).
As announced by the COP30 Presidency, in its report following the 4th Ministerial Meetings on Urbanization and Climate Change, as part of the goal of strengthening local leadership in the global fight against climate change, the FYC CPLF formula, developed with the Government of Cameroon, FEICOM, local and regional governments associations, and supported by UCLG, ADEME and the European Union, confirms a growing international consensus: national climate ambition will only be delivered if cities and regions sit inside the system, not at its margins.
Reflected in the Seville Platform for Action, the U20 Final Communiqué, the COP30 Action Agenda, and the Yearbook of Global Climate Action 2025, the CPLF methodology guides countries in shaping coordinated, multi-actor financial ecosystems. Developed hand in hand with subnational public finance experts, it supports the development of a new generation of national financing systems capable of grounding climate ambition in territorial implementation.
Finance Your Cities Cameroon is the first of a growing cohort, with an ambition to mobilize USD 350 million by 2028 and involve more than 200 local and regional governments.
Madagascar has already joined as the second pilot country, working with FMDV, the Local Development Fund (FDL) and national institutions to adapt the model.
What CPLFs Are Really About
The opening session of the COP30 Finance days clarified the stakes: traditional country platforms have existed in energy, food systems, and ecological transitions—but none have yet solved the challenge of localized financing.
CPLFs do.
Country Platforms for Localizing Finance are not just new labels in an already crowded landscape.
They are national, country-owned mechanisms that re-organize the way climate finance reaches territories by:
- Structuring the “last mile” of climate finance with explicit subnational windows and shared project pipelines between central governments, public development banks, and local and regional governments;
- Aligning policies, instruments and actors – from NDCs and public investment plans to city climate strategies around a single, coherent architecture instead of fragmented projects;
- Shifting from one-off projects to long-term portfolios, so that adaptation and resilience investments in secondary cities, metropolitan regions and vulnerable territories can be financed at scale.
In Cameroon, the Finance Your Cities platform is the first building block of such an architecture: humble in size for now, but structurally important. It connects ministries, FEICOM as a subnational financial intermediary, and the cities themselves around a common pipeline of climate and development projects, prepared to meet the standards of national and international financiers.
The same methodology is being adapted in Madagascar, with the Local Development Fund (FDL) and national authorities, confirming that CPLFs are not theoretical concepts but country-led platforms under construction.
SDBs and Their Global Alliance: The Missing Intermediaries Step Forward
Throughout the Urban Finance Engine session, panellists emphasised a point FMDV has championed for more than a decade: no CPLF can function without strong public financial intermediaries.
This is where Subnational Development Banks (SDBs) and their Global Alliance, facilitated by FMDV, step in.
SDBs are uniquely positioned to:
- Provide grants, operationalize transfers, lend in local currency and on long tenors for adaptation and resilient infrastructure;
- Blend domestic resources, international climate finance and private capital;
- Stay close to local and regional governments, turning scattered local projects into structured, risk-managed portfolios.
At COP30, several members of the Global Alliance – including BRDE (Brasil), DBSA (South Africa), FONPLATA (LAC), FEICOM (Cameroon), FNEC (Benin), ANAFIC (Guinea), and others – stood alongside FMDV and partner governments to confirm that CPLFs and SDBs are mutually reinforcing:
- CPLFs give SDBs a clear mandate, pipeline and governance framework to work with cities and regions.
- SDBs give CPLFs the financial “backbone” they need to move from dialogue to disbursement.
The international community at the Hub recognized SDBs as the essential “localizers” of climate finance, not as afterthoughts.
With the launch of the Casebook on SDBs: Banking the Last Mile, FMDV and partners show how SDBs can anchor national architectures for localized climate finance. These insights now feed directly into CPLFs, FinHubs and the fast-expanding LLCA momentum under the GCF.
A Formula That Resonates Across Countries
During the Hub’s two panels, ministers, mayors and development banks from Africa and Latin America (Mauritania, Togo, Benin, South Africa, Brazil) shared their own experiences with national climate funds, municipal development banks, regional adaptation facilities and urban resilience programmes.
What emerged is a strong convergence around the core ingredients of the FYC CPLF model:
- A country-led platform anchored in national policy frameworks, not a project-by-project marketplace;
- An explicit focus on the subnational level – cities, regions, utilities – as implementers and co-investors;
- A partnership-based approach, where governments, SDBs and international partners co-design the system rather than multiply parallel initiatives.
These ingredients explain the strong interest expressed in adapting this formula to their own contexts – not as a copy-paste, but as a structured and realistic path to raise ambition and implementation capacity through the subnational level.
LLCA: GCF Opens the Door for Grant-Funded Platforms
The timing could hardly be better. On 7 November 2025, the Green Climate Fund formally released its Locally Led Climate Action (LLCA) Framework and Guidance, which puts devolved decision-making and finance, local ownership and sustainable local capacities at the heart of its approach.
The LLCA package includes:
- Three core parameters for locally led action, including devolved finance to relevant local actors;
- A practical checklist for Concept Notes and Funding Proposals to ensure that GCF projects genuinely empower local actors;
- Dedicated annexes on readiness activities and on how to structure context-specific financing and delivery models.
This is a potential game changer for CPLFs and Finance Your Cities:
- It opens a clear pathway for using GCF Readiness and other grant windows to finance the “software” of country platforms and FinHubs – governance, coordination, project preparation, capacity-building – not only the “hardware” of infrastructure.
- It aligns a major global fund with the very logic of FYC CPLFs: devolved decision-making, local pipelines, and durable local institutional capacity.
In other words, what partner countries and SDBs are building with FMDV on the ground now has a direct counterpart in the global funding architecture.
Adding to this momentum, the GCF announced that it intends to support more than 15 national country platforms at COP30, and explicitly encouraged partners to expand this number.
FMDV, together with the AMUF Alliance and the Global Alliance of SDBs, answered that call by presenting a cohort of African champion countries ready to establish their own Finance Your Cities CPLFs.
A Determining First Step – With Partners at the Centre
FMDV’s role in this moment is clear and modest at the same time: to help design and operationalise CPLFs and FinHubs with and for countries, and to connect them to the Alliance of SDBs and international funds.
The Finance Your Cities Cameroon platform is not yet a full national architecture for subnational finance. It is a determining first step: a tangible proof of concept that countries, SDBs and local and regional governments can sit around the same table to organise the last mile of climate finance as a system, rather than a project lottery.
Thanks to the constant support of partner governments, SDBs and international institutions, this step is no longer isolated. With the LLCA Framework now in place, the ambition and the next phase are clear: to move from a handful of pioneering platforms to a cohort of champion countries where CPLFs, SDBs and climate funds work together to deliver resilient, low-carbon and inclusive development where it matters most: in cities and territories.
