This Working Paper addresses the following question: are climate change-related expenditures starting to appear in national budgets to secure the early implementation of countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs)? It examines the evidence of resourcing NDC policies and actions in four sub Saharan African countries – Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya and Uganda – that are known to be vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. These are all non-Annex I Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The paper first examines the level of spending that passes through the countries’ national budgets for those ministries that play a leadership role in the sectors considered strategic to implementing the NDCs. Significant discrepancies exist between these ministry budget estimates and actual spending in the countries reviewed, raising questions over the potential for speedy implementation of new and additional climate change-related programmes.
How the national budget is constructed has a major bearing on the extent to which NDC-related actions can be identified as part of government spending. Budgetary reform in all four countries, including the recent introduction of programme-based budgeting, has raised the possibility of identifying such expenditures more readily than was previously possible. A review of national budget spending in Ghana, Kenya and Uganda suggests limited resources are being allocated to NDC-related actions.
