Satu Santala starts as the Managing Director

Satu Santala, NDF’s new Managing Director, has built her career across the world and it now brings her back to the Nordic cooperation. With a strong Nordic identity and commitment to contribute to solving the big global challenges, she feels she has now found her home.

Her whole career has been with international relations, always with a focus on development. With NDF this all comes together.

“I have a genuine concern for the state of our planet and for the unequal burden it brings on people. I am here to guide NDF in addressing these challenges and be part of building a more just and fair world," she says.

NDF Board approves a grant for locally led climate action

NDF Board approves a 10-million-euro grant for the Locally Led Climate Action project, to be implemented in Sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia. The project is led by the World Bank and will support the development of nationwide systems and capacity to crowd-in, absorb and manage climate finance at national and local levels. The aim is to improve planning and managing local climate actions in Tanzania, Rwanda, Bangladesh and Nepal. At the same time, preparations start in 3-5 other countries.

“Local communities are on the frontline of climate change impacts, yet rarely have a voice in the decisions that affect them most. We are excited about this new partnership with the World Bank transforming the top-down approaches to a new model where local actors have more power and resources to build resilience to climate change”, says Ole Stubdrup, Project Manager at NDF.

CRPP’s gender window secures funding for women in Asia and the Pacific

On this year's International Women’s Day we highlighted the Community Resilience Partnership Programme (CRPP), led by the Asian Development Bank, which aims to strengthen climate resilience of countries and communities in Asia and the Pacific through scaling up climate adaptation measures, that address the nexus between climate change, gender and poverty. 

Given NDF’s strong focus on gender equality, one third of the NDF grant goes to CRPP’s dedicated window on gender, which aims to finance women-led projects or projects that benefit women in the communities.

"CRPP’s gender window is a response to try to address the lack of funding to gender equality. I think that often there’s an assumption that if we are working on climate adaptation, it is automatically inclusive or has direct benefits to women, but that’s not always the case. The gender window is a vehicle of being intentional in putting financial resources to grassroots women’s hands,” says Zonibel Woods, Senior Social Development Specialist from the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

Improved hydro-met services help prepare for extreme weather in Mozambique

Mozambique, on Africa’s southeast coast, is one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change and is often affected by extreme weather conditions. 

The HydroMet project has managed to improve the country’s water and weather systems. NDF provided EUR 4.4 million to build a system which provides reliable and timely information that increases climate resilience. Now, meteorologists and national disaster management authorities have a modern forecast-based early warning system to help protect people and assets. 

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Nordic leadership in addressing climate change and development challenges

We advance Nordic leadership in addressing climate change and development challenges through financing, knowledge and partnerships. Together with our strategic partners, we develop, launch and scale high-impact projects to support developing countries and the most vulnerable people affected by climate change.