By Faridat Salifu
If Africa is going to absorb the economic shocks climate change keeps delivering, the deciding factor won’t be how much capital flows in it’ll be whether that capital actually reaches women, smallholder farmers and small businesses.
That was the throughline at the Africa Inclusive Climate Finance Conference 2026, held in Lagos and organized jointly by LAPO Microfinance Bank and the World Savings and Retail Banking Institute (WSBI).
Under the banner “Gender-Smart Finance for Climate-Smart Agriculture: Building Inclusive Rural Economies,” the gathering pulled in bankers, regulators, development finance specialists, tech companies and private-sector figures to work through how financial inclusion, climate resilience and women’s economic participation intersect.
Cynthia Ikponmwosa, who leads LAPO as CEO, opened by tying the climate emergency directly to a financing shortfall one that lands hardest on people whose livelihoods depend on farming or informal work. Her argument: talk of climate resilience means little if women farmers, rural families and small enterprises can’t get their hands on capital to adapt.
She pressed banks to abandon rigid, conventional lending frameworks in favor of products shaped around how underserved communities actually earn and manage risk.
WSBI’s Peter Simon brought a longer view, invoking the institute’s 100-plus years pushing inclusive finance globally and in Nigeria.
His argument centered on distribution: raising more capital matters less than making sure it actually filters down to grassroots businesses and households — something he said savings and retail banks are uniquely positioned to do.
Visa’s Chidozie Arinze approached the issue from the technology side, arguing that digital payment infrastructure is what makes reaching excluded populations feasible at scale — not just cheaper, but more transparent and easier for people to actually use.
LAPO’s ESG board chair, Angela Omeiza, pushed the room to think beyond surface-level “products for women.” Real gender-smart finance, she said, means understanding the specific economic risks women navigate especially in agriculture and informal trade and designing capital access around those realities rather than bolting a label onto standard offerings.
A good chunk of the agenda focused on turning climate exposure into something banks can actually underwrite.
One panel on mapping climate risk and building inclusive financial products from it featured WSBI’s Al-Amine Nejjar (also chairman of Al Barid Bank’s board in Morocco) discussing how African savings banks can drive MSME financing and resilience-building, alongside Babban Gona’s Kola Masha, who spoke to reframing smallholder farmers’ climate risk as bankable opportunity rather than a reason to avoid lending.
Attendees also grappled with how climate disruption is already squeezing African small businesses through higher costs, broken supply chains, falling output and shifting demand patterns.
A separate panel, “When Capital Meets Climate: Rethinking What Impact Really Means,” urged the audience to stop measuring success by capital volume alone and start asking what that capital actually changes on the ground.
Panelists included LAPO’s Chief Digital Officer Dorcas Thorpe, the Central Bank of Nigeria’s Oluwaseun Sofuyi, and DBN’s Ayodele Olojede, who discussed digital services, consumer protections and development finance as tools for making climate money translate into real improvements in people’s lives.
The consensus that emerged: closing Africa’s climate finance gap will take sustained coordination across banks, governments, development institutions, tech firms and businesses.
For LAPO, the event reaffirmed a shift already underway in how it defines financial inclusion not just opening access to capital, but building people’s capacity to withstand shocks and keep growing afterward.
A parallel WSBI regional meeting, held alongside the main conference, covered similar ground on inclusive and climate-smart banking, SME development and digital transformation across the continent.
Source : the conversation.com
