Picture the moment a climate finance deal closes – there’s a signing ceremony, a press release, and a round of applause in a conference room somewhere. A guarantee facility is launched. A blended finance vehicle is live. On paper, the hardest part is over: the capital has been unlocked.
A year later, look at the same deal again. The capital is still sitting there. Technically the capital is committed, but practically unspent – nowhere for the money to land.
How do you turn a capital commitment into measurable delivery on the ground? This was the question at the center of a recent conversation between Chemonics and Human Planet GMBH, convened in collaboration with the UAE-based Global Climate Finance Centre. The problem is usually not lack of intent. It is a gap in the structure needed to move capital towards delivery.
Blended finance solves one half of a hard problem. Concessional capital, whether through grants, guarantees, or first loss, can absorb or mitigate risks that private investors are unwilling to take on alone, allowing them to participate on terms they can accept. This has created investable opportunities in markets and/or sectors where private capital may not otherwise flow.
But ‘investable’ and ‘deployable’ are not the same thing. Structure gets the money to the starting line. It does not take it to the next level: who receives it, who accounts for it, who reports on it to funders/investors, and who builds the institutional muscle to absorb a multi-year program without collapsing. That is a different set of skills entirely, and it is often left out of the room when a deal is first put together.
So, the capital sits – not because the instrument was flawed, but because the delivery system needed to put it to work was never built alongside it.
Design for Delivery from Day One
The partnerships that close this gap do not treat delivery as something to figure out after signing. They design it from the very beginning, alongside the financial architecture, so the moment the capital closes the delivery architecture is already taking shape: the right institutions engaged, staffing and systems planned, and adaptive management built in to respond to whatever the first 12-18 months bring.
This is the driver of the collaboration between Human Planet and Chemonics. Human Planet brings its expertise in capital strategy and blended finance structuring. Chemonics brings decades of experience building institutions, systems, and programs capable of delivering at scale. In practice, these disciplines must inform one another. The design of a guarantee or concessional tranche needs to reflect what is operationally realistic on the ground. At the same time, the institutions, monitoring frameworks, and local capacity around a program also need to be designed with a clear understanding of the capital structure behind it.
Neither part of this conversation can be finished in isolation. When done this way, delivery stops being an afterthought once the financing is signed; it becomes the reason the financing works.
How does the climate sector make delivery a reality? It often involves working with government and institutional partners on the ground to build the enabling environment to absorb and effectively use capital investment.
For example, in South Africa, Chemonics worked directly with municipalities across eight provinces, embedding advisors and technical specialists where local resources and know-how fell short. The challenge wasn’t a shortage of climate opportunities – it was about turning opportunities into projects that could attract investment and create impact. Chemonics ran feasibility assessments and provided hands-on project development support, building a pipeline of commercially investable projects that helped mobilize over $200 million in financing. At the same time, we strengthened capacity across 28 institutions, so they could keep developing and delivering projects on their own. The lesson was the same: a pipeline of ideas is not enough. Investors want to see processes, ownership, and institutions capable of carrying projects forward and making them commercially viable over time.
Structure for Deployment, Not Just Commitment
That lesson doesn’t stay contained to South Africa, it holds true for any climate deal, in any market, long before a project ever reaches the ground.
That means asking two questions from the start:
1) Can we finance this?
2) Is there a system ready to deploy capital, manage it, and adapt as conditions change?
Take a guarantee facility structured well: alongside the guarantee comes a standardized process — clear contracts, a transparent way to bring in developers and financiers, advisory support to work through — so everyone in the chain has a system to build against, not just a commitment they can point to. That’s what turns a signed guarantee into a built, operating project. Without it, the same guarantee can sit unused for years — still committed on paper, still nowhere near delivering anything.
Together, Human Planet and Chemonics are bringing capital structuring and delivery design into the same conversation from the start. Because when both are designed together, capital has a better chance of doing what it was intended to do: deliver impact.
