Africa doesn’t need more climate plans. It needs the systems to deliver them. I’ve seen the alternative too many times: a city declares bold climate targets, and six months later the plan is gathering dust while the crisis deepens.
That’s why we proposed a Sustainability Hub when we were invited to co-develop a climate strategy for a Nigerian state.
Why good climate plans gather dust
This isn’t a failing of the officials who write the plans. Responsibility is split across ministries, agencies, funders and firms, and nobody has the mandate to join it up. Political cycles move leaders on before the work is embedded. Tight budgets and technical complexity are real causes too, but when nobody owns delivery, each becomes a reason to stop.
Consider a city with a strong flood resilience plan. After an election, the official leading it moves department. A funder asks for a project pipeline, and there isn’t one. By the following year, the plan still reads well and nothing has been built.
Ambition without infrastructure means no results.
Build the system, then the plan
We found a strong vision with no system to deliver it, so we proposed a platform alongside the plan. The best strategy is one you’re equipped to execute.
Plans usually run in one order: write the policy, hope someone implements it, then measure the failure. The hub model builds the platform first, connects everyone who has to act, helps them deliver, then scales what works. Delivery is designed in from day one.
Execution isn’t a phase. It’s a system.
What the Sustainability Hub connects
The hub is a climate delivery engine joining four pairs that usually work apart:
- Policymakers and implementers, working to one programme.
- Global expertise and local entrepreneurs, so outside knowledge builds firms that stay.
- Climate finance and investable projects, prepared to a funder’s standard.
- Research and real-world action, so findings change what happens on the ground.
Its core job is coordination and continuity: holding the strategy together when leaders change or a workstream stalls, and getting the first projects moving.
Ideas are fragile. This is how we protect them.
What it carries, and why it lasts
The hub was designed to anchor a full programme: climate risk and emissions assessment, circular economy systems that turn waste into jobs, nature-based flood and erosion control, clean transport, and off-grid energy for SMEs and communities. Run separately, each has its own point of failure. On one platform, they share people, data and a route to finance.
It also builds what stalled plans lack: institutional memory beyond political cycles, cross-sector collaboration, an innovation-to-execution pipeline, live tracking of results, access to funders, partners and expertise, and on-the-ground skills at scale. The last decides whether anything outlasts the advisers. So the hub is locally led, built for real delivery with capital pipelines in place, and permanent.
A replicable model for African cities
Across the continent, we see the same barriers: big climate ambition, fragmented stakeholders, limited delivery capacity and local solutions that don’t scale. Because the barriers repeat, the model can travel.
A hub isn’t always the right answer. Where a city already has a funded delivery agency with a clear mandate, strengthen that instead of adding a layer. Without a political sponsor, a hub becomes another committee.
Four questions before the next target
- Who owns delivery once the plan is published, and after the next election?
- Which local firms will do the work, and who connects them to outside expertise?
- Which projects could a funder assess today, and who’s preparing the rest?
- Who turns research findings into decisions on the ground?
If any answer is “nobody yet”, the plan needs a delivery system before it needs another target.
If your climate plan has targets but no system to deliver them, start here.