Africa’s negotiators arrive at COP31 with a delivery problem before any talks on money even begin. The summit, hosted by Türkiye with Australia leading negotiations, opens on 9 November and runs to 20 November at the Turkish Riviera. Yet the African Group of Negotiators must first secure the right to place climate finance on the agenda at all. Its chair, Nana Dr Antwi-Boasiako Amoah, is blunt about the gap: “there is no agenda item within the UNFCCC as we speak that provides space to discuss public financing”.
The bloc wants an item created under Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement, the 2015 provision obliging developed countries to provide financial resources to developing ones. Wealthy governments have resisted so far. Amoah, speaking from South Korea where he was attending a Green Climate Fund board meeting, expects the same again. “There is a likelihood that they will oppose the adoption of the agenda because of the inclusion of this agenda item,” he said. For the negotiators, simply keeping the item alive would count as a result. “Getting it maintained for a conversation for us is going to be a big success,” he said.
The operational stakes are visible in the record of past pledges. Developed countries first exceeded their commitment to mobilise $100 bn annually in 2022, two years after the original deadline. The OECD puts the total at $136.7 bn in 2024, but the earlier delay has not been erased. At COP29 in Baku, countries agreed a collective goal of at least $300 bn a year for developing nations by 2035, set inside a broader $1.3 trillion mobilisation target drawn from all sources, including private capital. Because the $300 bn goal allows public and private sources alike, the terms of delivery remain contested. Amoah wants public financing, including grants, given a distinct negotiating space rather than being folded into wider capital mobilisation. Need is rising while support shrinks, he warned, citing declines not only in climate finance but also in official development assistance. The problem, he argued, is built into the architecture.
Enforcement of delivery has been the structural weakness. The climate convention and the Paris Agreement place obligations on developed countries, but compelling payment has proved difficult. Amoah credited the International Court of Justice’s 2025 advisory opinion with changing the conversation, noting that weak enforcement had limited countries’ ability to secure support, using the example of Germany providing money to Ghana. The court clarified states’ existing duties and the legal consequences of breaches. Advisory opinions are not themselves binding, and how far this one moves negotiating rooms remains untested. Still, Amoah suggested it has given African diplomats firmer footing.
Meanwhile, the summit’s own headline initiative is under delivery scrutiny. The Turkish presidency promotes a pledge for electricity to supply 35% of global final energy consumption by 2035. Amos Wemanya, a senior climate adviser at Power Shift Africa, called the agenda a historic opportunity but warned that electrification without energy justice is not progress. Nearly 600 million Africans lack electricity, he said, and the continent receives just 21% of the finance needed for renewable energy, transport and universal energy access. “Africa cannot simply exchange fossil fuel dependence for debt dependence, foreign control and a new era of mineral extraction,” he said.
Connection numbers alone tell little, argued Hope Dlamini, a strategist at Africa Change Lab. “Electrification is a means to an end, not the end itself,” she said. She also flagged a financing bottleneck: many African governments borrow in foreign currencies to build infrastructure while earning revenue in local ones, so repayments balloon when currencies weaken. “We cannot finance a just transition through debt structures that make clean energy increasingly unaffordable and unattractive,” she said. Simphiwe Ngwenya of South Africa’s Presidential Climate Commission wants finance to reach local governments, asserting that is where the rubber meets the road.
Minerals are the other implementation frontier. Cobalt, lithium, manganese and other resources critical to batteries and renewable technology are what African countries want to turn into industrial opportunities. Amoah asked why Africa should “just mine and export these minerals in a raw form”, saying industrialisation means a “second look at how these resources are tapped and then processed”. Kudakwashe Manjonjo, a just energy transition adviser at Power Shift Africa, said the bloc is clear that “there will be no transition without our minerals”, and argued for redirecting existing finance, citing World Bank spending on minerals supply chains, towards industrialisation rather than transport corridors alone. Shady Khalil of Oil Change International put it bluntly: “Transition minerals are in our ground.”
The strategy’s weak point, Amoah conceded, is coordination. Western governments negotiate resource deals one country at a time, so an approach to Kenya or Ghana “is not a matter of the African group”. African capitals must align domestic policies with collective demands “so that we can be able to walk the talk”, he concluded. Dlamani made a similar point about the deals themselves, warning that countries “can undermine ourselves through the deals we sign”. Economist Aly Khan Satchu was sceptical about the leverage altogether, saying Western bandwidth is absorbed by bond markets, fuel sourcing and artificial intelligence capital, and that processing value at home “is not yet proven”.
The African Group’s three stated priorities are advancing the climate finance agenda, putting the just transition mechanism mandated at COP30 in Belém into practice, and ensuring governments lead development of indicators for the Global Goal on Adaptation. On the third, Amoah warned that handing the process to outside experts, “who are mainly from developed countries, is suicidal for us”. Civil society is drawing lines too. The Pan African Climate Justice Alliance says Africa “cannot continue to pay three times for a crisis it did not create”, and warns that unilateral measures such as CBAM, the European Union’s carbon border levy which entered its definitive phase in January, risk imposing new costs on countries that contributed least. Amoah said a climate and trade workshop launched in June remains fragile but has opened a new avenue for discussion.
By contrast with the fragile workshop, the longer timeline is clear. With Ethiopia preparing to host COP32 in Addis Ababa next year, Amoah sees the Antalya summit, dubbed an implementation COP, as its foundation. “Once we can get a decision here, Ethiopia will pick it up, and then we start building it up from there,” he said. The goal, he added, is to “bring back hope into multilateral” cooperation at a time when many see it fading.