By Faridat Salifu
For Africa to weather the mounting economic toll of climate change, financial institutions will need to put women, smallholder farmers and micro, small and medium enterprises at the heart of their climate financing strategies that was the central message from experts at the Africa Inclusive Climate Finance Conference 2026 in Lagos.
The event, hosted by LAPO Microfinance Bank alongside the World Savings and Retail Banking Institute (WSBI), carried the theme “Gender-Smart Finance for Climate-Smart Agriculture: Building Inclusive Rural Economies.” It drew together banks,
regulators, development finance institutions, tech firms and private-sector players to dig into how climate resilience, financial inclusion, women’s economic empowerment and sustainable business overlap.
LAPO’s CEO, Cynthia Ikponmwosa, framed the climate crisis as inseparable from a financing crisis one that hits hardest in communities reliant on farming and informal work.
Her argument: without real access to capital for women farmers, rural households and small businesses, climate finance risks staying abstract, disconnected from the people it’s supposed to help. She called on lenders to rethink standard loan models and instead build products around the actual income rhythms and vulnerabilities of underserved groups.
WSBI’s Peter Simon added historical weight to the discussion, pointing to the organization’s century-plus track record advancing inclusive finance worldwide and in Nigeria specifically.
His point was that savings and retail banks have a particular role to play in getting climate finance down to the grassroots the goal isn’t just raising more capital, he suggested, but making sure it actually lands where it’s needed most.
From the payments side, Visa’s Chidozie Arinze made the case for digital finance as a key lever for expanding access, arguing that digital tools let institutions reach underserved populations more efficiently while boosting transparency and participation in the formal economy.
Angela Omeiza, who chairs LAPO’s ESG board, pushed back on a narrow view of “gender-smart” finance she argued it shouldn’t just mean designing products labeled for women, but genuinely understanding the specific risks women face and the informal or agricultural income streams they rely on, then building financing around that reality.
Much of the conference centered on turning climate risk into something bankable. One session “Empowering Communities Through Climate Action: From Climate Risk Mapping to Inclusive Climate-Smart Financial Solutions” looked at how institutions might use climate-risk data to build products that help vulnerable communities weather and recover from climate shocks.
Al-Amine Nejjar of WSBI (also chairman of Al Barid Bank’s management board in Morocco) spoke to the role African savings banks play in financing MSMEs and building resilience, while Babban Gona’s Kola Masha brought a smallholder-farming lens to the conversation, focused on converting farmers’ climate exposure into viable financing products.
Participants also flagged how climate disruptions are squeezing Africa’s MSME sector more broadly through higher operating costs, supply-chain breakdowns, productivity losses and shifting consumer demand.
A separate high-level panel, “When Capital Meets Climate: Rethinking What Impact Really Means,” pushed attendees to look past how much capital gets deployed and focus instead on what it actually achieves.
Speakers included LAPO’s Chief Digital Officer Dorcas Thorpe, the Central Bank of Nigeria’s Oluwaseun Sofuyi, and Ayodele Olojede of the Development Bank of Nigeria covering digital financial services, consumer protection and development finance as levers for translating climate finance into real livelihood improvements.
The overall takeaway: closing the financing gap for climate-vulnerable communities will require deeper collaboration between banks, governments, development partners, tech companies and businesses. For LAPO, the event reinforced a broader shift in how it sees financial inclusion not just providing access to capital, but building people’s and businesses’ capacity to absorb shocks, recover and keep pursuing opportunity.
The parallel WSBI Africa Regional Group Meeting echoed similar themes, touching on inclusive banking, SME and rural economic development, and digital transformation.
As climate pressures build, the consensus was clear: capital, technology and partnerships need to be aimed at moving women, farmers and small businesses from vulnerability toward resilience and eventually, sustainable growth.
