HOUGHTON, Mich. (WLUC) – As students prepare to graduate in the coming weeks, the cost of living continues to grow around them.

One Houghton County school hopes to prepare them to financially face those obstacles.

“It’s all really mundane things that you wouldn’t usually think that you would need a class to learn,” Senior Katie Manchester said. “But then you’re in the class, and you’re like ‘Oh, this is actually really helpful’”.

Manchester is among the juniors and seniors at Houghton High School who participated in its third annual Financial Reality Fair on Tuesday. Each year, students in the school’s Personal Finance class get a glimpse into what independent life could be like after graduation.

Personal finance teacher Jennifer Rubin says that students learning personal finance skills is more important than ever.

“Everyone’s pocketbooks have been stretched,” Rubin said. “I think people see it in their own households. They see it with their parents struggling with finances, and they see gas prices. They’re seeing all of these things having much more of an impact than maybe it used to be a few years ago.”

Rubin says students got hands-on training during the fair, making financial decisions and budgeting. Senior Elli Sommerville found this particularly useful.

“I knew about budgeting beforehand, but actually getting to do it was really helpful,” Sommerville said. “We worked on it for about a month.”

Student Kylie Hatman said the fair helped her better understand her habits.

“Budgeting is a main thing for me,” Hatman. “I figured out that I don’t spend as much as I think I do. I liked the ‘Budget Down to Zero’ method. Figuring out how to format that really helped me.”

Rubin notes that these students will soon take these skills and teach them to a younger generation at Houghton-Portage Elementary School.

“Tomorrow, all seniors in personal finance are partnering with an elementary classroom, and they’re going to be teaching the elementary kids,” Rubin added. “They’re going to be the teacher.”

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Macroeconomic reforms and escalating climate shocks are placing climate finance at the center of Ethiopia’s development trajectory. The country contributes 0.4% of global emissions but faces high climate risks, particularly due to its reliance on rain-fed agriculture and hydropower. At the same time, high inflation, foreign-exchange shortages, rising debt service obligations, and a recent sovereign default have constrained fiscal space and raised the cost of capital. Ethiopia must therefore rapidly scale up climate investment in line with its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC 3.0), while navigating macroeconomic constraints and the declining predictability of international concessional and donor finance.

Ethiopia’s climate policy framework is increasingly investment-oriented, moving from ambition to action. Building on the Climate Resilient Green Economy (CRGE) Strategy (2011) and earlier NDCs, the country’s NDC 3.0 (2025–2035) shifts from high-level ambition toward defined sectoral pathways and financing needs. Parallel reforms signaling growing institutional readiness include greening the financial sector under the National Bank of Ethiopia, developing a national green taxonomy, capital market reforms linked to the Ethiopian Securities Exchange, and emerging carbon market frameworks. However, coordination challenges, fragmented mandates, and limited project preparation capacity continue to constrain delivery.

Tracking how climate finance is mobilized and deployed is critical to inform policy decisions, guiding development partner strategies, and identify opportunities to crowd in domestic and private capital. This second iteration of the Landscape of Climate Finance in Ethiopia provides an updated baseline of project-level climate finance commitments for 2019 to 2023, with a focus on the biennial average for 2022 and 2023. It tracks flows across mitigation, adaptation, and dual-benefit activities, mapping finance from domestic and international sources, through public and private actors, to instruments and end-use sectors.

This assessment draws on publicly available and proprietary datasets compiled on a best-effort basis. Data gaps remain material, especially for domestic public spending, given the absence of systematized climate budget tagging, and for certain private sector investments that are not consistently disclosed. As a result, some flows, particularly domestic public spending and difficult-to-track private investments, are likely underestimated.

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Key findings

• Ethiopia’s climate finance has gradually increased but must rise by at least fourfold to meet identified needs. Tracked flows averaged USD 2.3 billion annually in 2022/23, equivalent to approximately 1.7% of GDP. This is an 11% increase from the annual average of USD 2.1 billion in 2020/21 but still well below the estimated USD 10.6 billion annual requirement under the NDC 3.0 (2025–2035).

• Ethiopia’s heavy reliance on international public sources exposes its climate agenda to the constraints of external concessional finance. In 2022/23, 93% of tracked flows originated from international public sources. Public actors committed approximately USD 2.2 billion annually, primarily through grants (80%) and concessional debt (14%). Multilateral development finance institutions and donor governments were the largest providers. This concentration underscores the urgency of mobilizing broader and more sustainable domestic and private funding sources.

• Ethiopia’s shallow capital markets and regulatory uncertainty have limited private climate finance. Private actors contributed USD 113 million annually in 2022/23, representing less than 5% of total flows. This is insufficient to signal a functioning market or provide any buffer against public finance volatility. Private flows were concentrated in agriculture, forestry, and other land use (AFOLU) and small-scale energy activities. Investments were influenced by guarantee-backed transactions and philanthropic grants. Macroeconomic risk, currency constraints, shallow capital markets, and regulatory uncertainty continue to deter private participation at scale.

• Adaptation finance accounts for the majority of Ethiopia’s climate flows, reflecting the country’s high vulnerability to drought, hydrological variability, and disaster risk. Adaptation represented 59% of tracked climate finance in 2022/23 (USD 1.4 billion annually), a slight rise from 56% in 2019/20. This finance was overwhelmingly grant-based (92%) and internationally sourced. While they exceed mitigation in volume, adaptation flows remain far below the estimated USD 4 billion annual need.

• Mitigation finance remains insufficient relative to emissions structure and targets and costed needs. These flows averaged approximately USD 500 million annually, compared to the estimated USD 6.6 billion requirement under NDC 3.0. Finance was concentrated in the energy sector and largely concessional in nature. Mitigation flows declined relative to 2020/21 due to project cycle effects. The AFOLU sector, a large source of emissions, received a small share of mitigation finance, highlighting a structural imbalance between emissions sources and investment patterns.

• Cross-sectoral and resilience-oriented programs feature prominently across both mitigation and adaptation. In 2022/23, adaptation investment averaged USD 644 million, mitigation investment USD 77 million, and dual-benefit projects received USD 306 million. These flows targeted initiatives such as disaster-risk management, food security, institutional capacity building, and policy support. This reflects Ethiopia’s integrated CRGE vision and climate–development nexus and requires strong coordination, monitoring, and financial management systems.

• Institutional reform momentum is building, but delivery constraints persist. Ethiopia has implemented several climate-related reforms, including fuel subsidy reform, electric mobility incentives, financial sector greening initiatives, carbon market readiness efforts, and capital market development. These reforms can help to mobilize domestic and private capital. Yet fragmented governance structures, limited project preparation capacity, incomplete climate finance tracking systems, and constrained fiscal space continue to limit the scale and predictability of flows.

Recommendations

Strengthening governance, institutional capacity, and monitoring systems can help align climate finance mandates, build investable pipelines, and improve investor confidence. Strategic use of concessional finance, supportive regulation, and appropriate financial instruments can help mobilize private capital over time. This report highlights six priority actions for scaling Ethiopia’s climate finance: 

1. Strengthen climate finance governance to accelerate implementation. Enhance the role of the Climate Resilient Green Economy (CRGE) strategy as an inter-ministerial coordination mechanism with clear mandates and decision rights. This should link NDC planning to budget allocation, including climate budget tagging, and be aligned with public financial management processes. TCRGE efforts can serve as a central platform for screening and prioritizing NDC-aligned projects, coordinating technical assistance, and structuring blended finance/PPP transactions. 

2. Build capacity for project preparation as well as institutional and subnational delivery to convert policy ambition into implementable pipelines. Improve technical capacity for feasibility studies, financial structuring, safeguards, risk allocation, and results-based planning across line ministries and subnational institutions, and establish standardized project preparation tools and targeted support for high-priority sectors, particularly AFOLU.

3. Strengthen climate finance tracking, transparency, and data credibility. Climate budget tagging could be extended to regional and local levels, as well as to climate-aligned sectors such as energy, AFOLU, transport, water and wastewater, buildings and infrastructure and industry. Embedding tagging in budget execution and reporting can reconcile climate-relevant expenditures with actual spending and outputs.

4. Optimize scarce public resources through catalytic de-risking and innovative fiscal instruments. Ethiopia must meet its NDC3.0 USD 2.4 billion annual domestic public finance target amid fiscal constraints, including rising debt servicing (13% of revenue), declining tax-to-GDP ratio (7.5%), and volatile donor finance. The country can strategically use its CRGE Facility and national funds to provide guarantees or first-loss capital to crowd in private flows. Aggregation mechanisms (SPVs, Platform-based structures, financial intermediary aggregation) can also help accelerate a shift from small, planning-oriented grants to scalable investments. Debt-for-climate swaps may be another viable source.

5. Unlock international and institutional capital through stronger enabling frameworks and domestic markets. High country risk, regulatory gaps, and weak monitoring limit private investment. Momentum is building through initiatives such as Ethiopia’s National Carbon Market Strategy, the establishment of the Ethiopian Securities Exchange, and the NBE’s Greening Financial Systems program. Next steps could include frameworks and regulations for carbon markets, green bonds, and other climate-aligned instruments to reduce uncertainty, enable transactions, and scale local-currency finance. Carbon markets offer a near-term opportunity to mobilize private capital, given the country’s land restoration and reforestation programs.

6. Scale finance for sectors that are hard to abate or prioritized under the NDC 3.0. The limited climate finance flowing to industry represents a missed opportunity, given the sector’s importance in shaping Ethiopia’s long-term emissions trajectory and development ambition. Costed pipelines for carbon-intensive sectors, blended finance, and technical assistance for project preparation, standards, and technology deployment can help direct more capital to NDC 3.0 mitigation priorities, including industrial energy efficiency, fuel switching, and low-carbon technologies.

Download the report

MoneyIQ is powered by gamified platform Zogo and integrated into Sezzle’s core app experience. It rewards users with Sezzle Spend for completing brief financial lessons, Sezzle said in a Monday (April 6) press release marking National Financial Literacy Month.

Consumers completed over 1 million lessons in less than a year after the launch of the MoneyIQ, according to the release.

In its consumer survey conducted in March, Sezzle found that 91% of users said MoneyIQ has been helpful in making financial decisions, 90% said they feel more confident managing their finances, 79% said they are more knowledgeable about personal finance topics, and 73% said they were paying closer attention to their spending.

“While some companies often focus solely on a single transaction, we have built Sezzle into a long-term partner for our users,” Sezzle Chief Operating Officer Amin Sabzivand said in the release. “By combining learning, earning, saving and budget-focused financing, we are helping users safely navigate the modern financial landscape with confidence.”

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “How Zillennials’ Financial Literacy Drives Their Financial Confidence” found that there is a correlation between financial literacy, improved financial standing and financial confidence.

Sezzle’s integration of the MoneyIQ financial literacy tool was another step in the Sezzle app’s evolution from a buy now, pay later (BNPL) into a comprehensive, all-in-one financial platform, per the company’s Monday press release. Sezzle has also added an Earn Tab that lets users play games to earn rewards, artificial intelligence-powered tools such as Sezzle’s AI Shopping Assistant and 24/7 AI Support, integrated Sezzle Mobile 5G cellular plans on AT&T’s network and powered by Gigs, and Sezzle Up opt-in credit reporting.

The company said in February that it is accelerating its super app plans in 2026 after seeing growing engagement with its existing offerings in 2025. It noted its integration of shopping, flexible payments and essential services.

Sezzle CEO Charlie Youakim said during a February earnings call: “Importantly, these features extend our value proposition beyond payments and move us closer to being an everyday financial companion for our consumers.”