[Event Recap] REPAIR Regional Workshop - Together, better prepared to REPAIR

A key milestone was reached on March 18-19th at the REPAIR Regional Workshop in Johannesburg, South Africa, to create a regional disaster risk platform between African countries with the support of the World Bank and African Risk Capacity Limited.

Natural disasters as floods, droughts or tropical storms are causing substantial losses and damages to African countries, increasing poverty, food insecurity and fragility.

REPAIR, a US$926 million regional Program adopted by the Board of Directors of the World Bank in July 2024, aims to enhance the financial resilience of 12 countries against natural disasters, by equipping Ministries of Finance with financial resources, instruments, and capacity building on disaster risk finance. It helps countries through all stages of a disaster risk finance strategy, from diagnostics to action. This large-scale climate adaptation program is implemented regionally by African Risk Capacity Limited (ARC Ltd), affiliated to the African Union.

It relies on the three core principles of speed, flexibility, and sustainability.

• Speed to quickly channel funds to affected people to save lives and livelihoods when a shock occurs.

• Flexibility to respond to the needs of each country.

• Sustainability to mobilize public and private financing, in the long run, to create a truly African Disaster Risk platform.

REPAIR is now effective in Comoros, Madagascar, and Mozambique who joined in 2024, with Angola, Burundi, Lesotho, Malawi, Seychelles, and Zambia expected to join by 2025. For Comoros, REPAIR arrived at the right time and was activated in response to the tropical Cyclone Chido in December 2024.

The REPAIR Regional Workshop was a 3-day invitation-only event that brought together expert delegations from 10 countries in southern Africa. During the workshop, participating countries discussed a common operational and governance framework to ensure a harmonized process. This is critical to timely channel fund to end beneficiaries and activities after a shock. The event allowed country expert teams to discuss the investment strategy of the Regional Climate Risk Fund managed by ARC Ltd, focusing on a unified investment strategy for their pooled reserves.

The workshop created an opportunity for genuine exchanges of country experiences. They shared challenges, learnings and solutions related to disaster risk finance and tools to improve their coverage and operational response to cope with upcoming droughts, floods, and storms of various severity and frequency. This collaboration aims to identify, improve, and scale up solutions to better help vulnerable populations with limited fiscal resources and set the stage for inclusive recovery.

This second workshop of its kind, the first took place in March 2024, received extremely positive feedback from the participants. Malawi aims to join REPAIR this year, Wilson Nyasulu Principal Economist, Economic Affairs Division, came to the workshop to learn from countries that have already implemented REPAIR and understand it more fully, stated “REPAIR is an anchor platform to improve the coordination of disaster risk financing initiative and disaster response.” Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), however, is still learning more about the program. Man-David T’sinda Kiala, Advisor to the Minister of Finance on climate finance and budget “exchange with other countries helped us identify what we need to do to join the program”

The World Bank is proud to contribute to this regional achievement, by supporting African countries in creating a joint risk platform to address the common challenge of financial preparedness to disasters caused by climate change. We would like to thank the contributions and hard work of the delegations of Angola, Burundi, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, and Seychelles.

We extend our gratitude to the African Development Bank and the Agence Française de Développement for their participation and thank the Global Shield Financing Facility for supporting such an ambitious program.

By delivering on REPAIR, participating countries and the World Bank mark a step forward to a world free of poverty on a livable planet.