Abstract

Global climate finance commitments under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) now exceed US$100 billion per year, yet less than one percent reaches smallholder farmers in the Sahel. This is a major imbalance because these farmers steward roughly 60 percent of Africa’s farmland and produce about 80 percent of its food. The adaptation gap for agrifood systems has been estimated at US$170-366 billion, and pressure on these systems is increasing as the region warms toward the +2 °C threshold projected in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. This study examines why finance so often fails to reach smallholders and whether locally rooted alternatives may help narrow the gap.

We develop and test a finance-access-resilience nexus, expressed as R=α(F×A) +βB+εR = \alpha (F \times A) + \beta B + \varepsilonR=α(F×A) +βB+ε, in which institutional access (AAA) conditions whether finance (FFF) can support resilience (RRR), while bottom-up practices (BBB) make a direct contribution. We examine this framework in Tokombéré commune, Cameroon, using a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design combining 225 household surveys, 20 key-informant interviews, satellite-based land-cover analysis, and 15 public finance and adaptation-plan documents.

The results show that access to top-down finance was low (index =0.18) and substantially below access through community channels (index=0.62; t=5.2, p<0.001). Hybrid arrangements combining local endorsement with modest blended finance were associated with resilience gains of about 21 percent. Flow analysis suggests that roughly 92 percent of national adaptation finance dissipated before reaching farms, with the environment ministry emerging as the main bottleneck, while community organisations retained a much larger share of the resources they handled. Institutional barriers technical, political, and commercial statistically accounted for 38 to 42 percent of the observed association between finance and resilience, and they were more severe for women and the smallest farms. Because the design is cross-sectional, these findings are interpreted as associations rather than causal effects. They suggest that widening institutional access, rather than increasing pledges alone, may be a more promising lever for Sahelian smallholder resilience and warrants longitudinal and experimental testing.

Keywords:Climate finance; Smallholder resilience; Sahel; Polycentric governance; Access barriers; Agroecology; Farmer-managed natural regeneration; Mixed methods; Cameroon