José Gabriel Martín Fernández, director at acciona.org, participated in the third edition of the European Humanitarian Forum (EHF24), held in Belgium on 19 March 2024.

This edition was conceived as a solution-oriented, innovative platform for high-level exchange between EU political decision-makers and key stakeholders within the international humanitarian community and beyond on the most pressing challenges the humanitarian system faces.

The Forum, co-hosted by the European Commission (DG ECHO) and Belgium in the framework of its Presidency of the Council of the EU, took place in the context of sharply increasing global humanitarian needs and limited funding, a challenge exacerbated by increasingly prolonged conflicts, shrinking humanitarian space, the politicisation of aid, and increasing vulnerabilities due to climate change. For those reasons, the EHF24 focused on two main thematic strands: the humanitarian funding gap and prioritisation, and forgotten crises and fragile humanitarian environments.

Gabriel Martin participated as a panellist in the session ‘Building stronger community resilience in fragile countries through better access to climate finance’.

The session was moderated by Catherine-Lune Grayson, head of Policy Team at International Committee of the Red Cross. The panelists were Gloria Namakula, Youth Representative from Uganda; Dominic Crowley, President of VOICE; Harpinder Collacott, Executive Director for Europe at Mercy Corps; Leyla Traore, head of the EIB Representative Office in Ethiopia and African Union; and José Gabriel Martín Fernández, director at acciona.org.

During this session they explained the main barriers are to accessing climate finance for the most climate-vulnerable countries and communities, focusing on those affected by violence and conflict. And innovative solutions were proposed that can overcome these barriers.

acciona.org works on enhancing access to energy, water and sanitation to low-income communities in many countries. We work to provide electricity to refugees and the host community in Ethiopia and we are also working developing a methodology tool to improve electricity access in humanitarian contexts.

Jose Gabriel Martin shared his experiences and learnings from these projects, the partnership models we are building to make it work, scalability of the models, among other issues.