Livelihoods, Economy and Climate Resilience
Livelihoods, Economy and Climate Resilience
Ensuring the green economy transition is equitable, inclusive, and protective of the livelihoods of women, youth, Indigenous peoples, and informal workers.
Our Strategic Framework
SACCN operationalizes its mission through eight interconnected strategic pillars — from livelihoods and climate finance to agrifood transformation, innovation, early warning, research, governance, and partnerships — each designed to deliver systemic, scalable, and sustainable impact across the SADC region.
Quick Overview
Hover or tap any card for a quick summary. Scroll down for the full strategic detail behind each pillar.
Ensuring the green economy transition is equitable, inclusive, and protective of the livelihoods of women, youth, Indigenous peoples, and informal workers.
Tackling both the quantity and quality of climate finance so funds reach frontline communities and deliver transformative, optimized impact.
Driving the convergence of climate, agriculture, and water policies to transform agrifood systems into engines of resilience and sovereignty.
Identifying, adapting, and scaling climate-smart innovations — from renewable energy to nature-based solutions and climate-and-sport initiatives.
Building robust, community-centered early warning systems and disaster preparedness frameworks that save lives and protect livelihoods.
Generating the research, data, and knowledge products that inform policy, empower communities, and drive advocacy across SADC.
Ensuring climate governance in Southern Africa is transparent, participatory, rights-based, and accountable to the people it serves.
Building, nurturing, and leveraging strategic partnerships that amplify our collective impact across Southern Africa.
In Depth
Click any pillar below to explore its strategic focus, key interventions, and the evidence driving our approach.
Protecting, empowering, and building the adaptive capacity of vulnerable communities through inclusive economic transformation and just transitions.
Southern Africa's most vulnerable communities — including women, youth, Indigenous peoples (such as the San and Khoi), persons with disabilities, rural smallholders, and informal sector workers — bear the heaviest burden of climate impacts while contributing least to the crisis. This pillar addresses this injustice by ensuring that the transition to a green economy is equitable, inclusive, and protective of livelihoods.
Just Transitions: We advocate for the equitable phase-out of fossil fuels (particularly coal in the Greater Limpopo and Karoo regions) while ensuring that fossil-fuel-dependent workers and energy-poor communities are protected through social safety nets, retraining programs, and dignified green job creation.
Climate-Induced Migration: We research the drivers of cross-border and internal displacement, advocate for protective policy frameworks aligned with the SADC DRR Strategy and regional migration protocols, and build the resilience of both origin and host communities.
Targeted Support to Vulnerable Communities: We provide livelihood diversification, social protection programs, and capacity building that enables marginalized groups to become active agents of their own resilience — grounded in subsidiarity, ensuring solutions are designed, led, and owned by the communities they serve.
Democratizing access to climate finance, ensuring accountability, and maximizing the socio-economic and ecological returns on every climate investment.
The global climate finance architecture remains fundamentally broken for Africa. Despite needing an estimated $277 billion annually, the continent receives less than 3% of global climate finance, with 71% delivered as loans rather than grants — deepening debt burdens and constraining fiscal space for climate action.
Direct Access Capacity: We build the capacity of local CSOs, community-based organizations, and national institutions to access global climate funds (GCF, GEF, Adaptation Fund, Loss and Damage Fund) through technical assistance on accreditation, proposal development, fiduciary standards, and environmental and social safeguards.
Climate Finance Tracking and Accountability: We conduct rigorous annual regional reports that expose the gap between pledged and delivered funds, analyze the grant-to-loan ratio, and advocate for debt cancellation and debt-for-climate swaps to free up fiscal space.
Optimising Returns on Investment: We promote innovative financial mechanisms — community trust funds, blended finance facilities, results-based financing — ensuring every dollar invested in adaptation and mitigation yields maximum socio-economic and ecological returns. We also advocate for fair international tax systems that redirect resources toward climate justice in Africa.
Transforming Southern Africa's agrifood systems into climate-resilient, regenerative, and smallholder-controlled ecosystems.
Agriculture is the backbone of Southern Africa's economy, employing over 60% of the population. Yet the sector is acutely vulnerable to climate shocks, with El Niño-induced droughts, erratic rainfall, and rising temperatures threatening food security for over 55 million people.
Agroecology and Regenerative Farming: We promote climate-smart agricultural practices that restore soil health, enhance biodiversity, sequester carbon, and improve yields without dependence on synthetic inputs — supporting farmer-led innovation and indigenous seed preservation.
Seed and Water Sovereignty: We protect indigenous seed varieties from corporate capture and advocate for Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) in transboundary river basins (Zambezi, Limpopo, Okavango, Incomati), supporting the SADC Regional Water Fund's objectives at community level.
Smallholder Empowerment: We ensure that smallholder farmers — particularly women, who produce up to 70% of the region's food — are at the center of agrifood policy dialogues, supporting localized value chains, market access, and decentralized renewable energy (solar cold storage, solar irrigation).
Pioneering, promoting, and scaling innovative, context-specific technologies and unconventional methodologies that bridge high-tech interventions with community-led practicalities.
The climate crisis demands innovation at every level — from cutting-edge renewable energy technologies to community-based, nature-inspired solutions. This pillar identifies, adapts, and scales climate-smart innovations across Southern Africa's diverse contexts.
Green Energy and Decentralized Technologies: We advocate for the rapid scale-up of decentralized renewable energy — solar mini-grids, solar home systems, solar cold storage, solar irrigation, and productive use of energy (PUE) — aligned with the mandate of SACREEE.
Climate-Smart Agriculture Innovations: Including drought-resistant crop varieties, precision irrigation, agroforestry, conservation agriculture, and digital advisory services that empower farmers to adapt.
Climate Change and Sport: We pioneer sport as a high-impact tool for climate education and mass youth mobilization — through eco-tournaments and partnerships with athletic influencers, aligning with the SADC Council of Ministers Responsible for Sports, Arts and Culture.
Nature-Based Solutions (NbS): Including ecosystem restoration, watershed rehabilitation, mangrove protection, and Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) delivering co-benefits for biodiversity, livelihoods, and carbon sequestration.
Shifting Southern Africa from reactive disaster response to proactive, risk-informed anticipatory action and preparedness.
Southern Africa is increasingly battered by climate shocks — from devastating cyclones (Idai, Freddy, Kenneth) to prolonged El Niño-induced droughts and catastrophic flooding. This pillar transforms the region's paradigm from reactive to proactive climate risk management.
Integrated Early Warning Systems: We integrate Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) with scientific meteorology, working with the SADC Climate Services Centre (SCSC) and national meteorological agencies to bridge the "last mile" gap in early warning dissemination.
Anticipatory Action and Forecast-Based Financing: We advocate for mechanisms that trigger pre-agreed actions and release pre-arranged funding before climate shocks peak — reducing response costs by up to 50% — aligned with the SADC DRR Strategy and the Sendai Framework.
Psychosocial Support and Mental Health: We integrate mental health support into disaster preparedness protocols, recognizing that climate shocks inflict profound psychological trauma alongside physical and economic damage.
Generating robust, localized evidence, driving high-impact advocacy, and building regional climate literacy through knowledge co-creation and dissemination.
Effective climate action must be grounded in rigorous evidence, contextual knowledge, and shared learning. This pillar generates the research, data, and knowledge products that inform policy and empower communities.
Participatory Action Research: We establish a regional platform honoring "Two-Eyed Seeing" — the ethical integration of Traditional Ecological Knowledge with empirical science, bringing together Indigenous knowledge holders, academic researchers, and policy experts.
High-Impact Advocacy and Awareness Campaigns: Tailored to diverse audiences and strategically timed to influence key policy windows (COPs, SADC Summits, national budget cycles), leveraging traditional media, digital platforms, and tools like "Climate and Sport."
Open-Access Knowledge Hubs: We maintain policy briefs, research reports, case studies, toolkits, and data sets, facilitating South-South learning exchanges, annual knowledge forums, and Communities of Practice.
Ensuring transparent, equitable, rights-based, and accountable environmental and climate governance at all levels.
Climate action without accountability is ineffective; climate action without justice is oppressive. This pillar ensures environmental and climate governance in Southern Africa is transparent, participatory, and accountable.
Natural Resources Governance: We demand transparency in extractive industries (mining, forestry, oil and gas), defend community land rights, and ensure rigorous Environmental and Social Impact Assessments (ESIAs) — advocating for fair benefit-sharing and the protection of environmental human rights defenders (EHRDs).
Policy Monitoring and Shadow Reporting: We track SADC Member States' implementation of regional protocols (Gender, Wildlife, Shared Watercourses, Climate Change) and produce civil society shadow reports presented at SADC Summits, AU forums, and UNFCCC COPs.
Institutional Strengthening: We build the governance, financial management, operational, and advocacy capacity of grassroots CSOs and social movements across our network.
Climate Justice and Human Rights: We frame all governance interventions through a rights-based lens, ensuring those least responsible for the climate crisis bear no further burdens and receive fair compensation for Loss and Damage.
Forging strategic, cross-sectoral, and transboundary coalitions to amplify impact, leverage resources, and drive systemic change.
The climate crisis cannot be solved in silos. It demands unprecedented collaboration across sectors, borders, and disciplines. This pillar builds and leverages strategic partnerships that drive systemic transformation.
Unified Civil Society Advocacy: We aggregate the voices of our 100+ member organizations to present a unified front at SADC Summits, AU forums, and UNFCCC COPs — coordinating regional negotiation positions and building alliances with Global South networks.
Cross-Sectoral Alliances: We forge partnerships with national governments, the SADC Secretariat and its specialized institutions (SCSC, SACREEE, DMC), academia, the private sector (under strict ethical guidelines preventing corporate capture), media, and international development partners.
Transboundary Collaboration: We address shared regional challenges — transboundary water management, cross-border climate migration, wildlife conservation, and regional energy integration.
Resource Mobilization: We work with donors, foundations, climate funds, and impact investors to secure flexible, multi-year funding — grounded in mutuality, transparency, complementarity, and African leadership.
Cross-Cutting Themes
The implementation of all eight pillars is underpinned by three non-negotiable cross-cutting themes that ensure our work remains ethical, inclusive, and impactful.
Ensuring women, youth, persons with disabilities, and Indigenous peoples are not just beneficiaries, but active leaders and decision-makers in all climate actions.
Framing all interventions through a rights-based lens, ensuring those least responsible for the climate crisis bear no further burdens and receive fair compensation for Loss and Damage.
Rigorous safeguarding to ensure all interventions minimize unintended negative social, economic, or environmental consequences.
Explore our programmes, access research, or join the network to advance climate action across Southern Africa's 8 strategic pillars.