Why are project preparation facilities (PPFs) important?

PPFs support cities in developing bankable, investment-ready projects, typically from a project’s concept, design, or scoping stage up to the financial close.

PPFs:

1. Serve as the “missing link” providing critical support for cities in preparing investment-ready projects that meet investors’ requirements and priorities.
2. Enhance collaboration between stakeholders, including local authorities, project developers, financiers, and city networks, to help move projects from concept to implementation.
3. Build financial and technical capacity of local authorities and project partners, enabling them to prepare, structure, and obtain finance for climate projects.

The urban climate infrastructure PPF landscape faces interlinked challenges:

1. Lack of information-sharing and partnerships among PPFs to efficiently and effectively coordinate preparation support for projects.
2. Slow and resource-intensive collaboration, which limits synergized action and hinders projects from progressing all the way through the preparation value chain.

This lack of information and fragmentation of the project preparation ecosystem creates barriers for cities to access preparation support.

To respond to these challenges, CCFLA convenes, connects, and informs on project preparation topics:

This analysis maps and identifies the key characteristics of the PPF support offered to cities to prepare sustainable and climate-resilient infrastructure projects. Its main goals are to understand the gaps and opportunities for improving this project preparation support at the urban level and increase collaboration among PPFs.

Building on CCFLA’s 2021 gap analysis of city-focused PPFs, this work has the following objectives:

• Creating an updated and more comprehensive mapping of PPFs, as of 2024.
• Comparing data from 2021 and 2024, where relevant, to capture the evolution of this support.
• Identifying data gaps that limit our understanding of the PPF landscape.

This analysis focuses on the number of PPFs present globally rather than their capacity (e.g., funding volume or total projects covered). While it examines PPFs’ formal eligibility criteria and support offerings, it does not evaluate their activities or how supported projects compare to the eligibility criteria. It also does not examine the alignment of PPF support offerings with cities’ needs, though this is a potential area for future research.

Methodology
We used desk-based research to expand CCFLA’s mapping of PPFs, which will be added to those already covered in our existing Project Preparation Resource Directory. This research also captures capacity development and project advisory programs, which we refer to collectively in this document as “PPFs”.

Publicly available information was collected through reviews of PPF websites, reports, and databases. We gathered data on PPFs operating internationally and, where possible, on those working at the national and subnational levels. This research was conducted in English, which may have limited the identification of PPFs operating in other languages.

We analyzed PPFs across six dimensions:

1. Coverage across geographies, i.e., countries, regions, and income levels.1
2. Preparation stages and sectors of projects supported.
3. Types of assistance provided: Technical assistance (TA), grants, and finance.
4. Project eligibility thresholds: The minimum ticket sizes that PPFs can support.
5. Implementers: Organizations running the PPFs
6. Application calls: How frequently Implementers accept applications (rolling or specific calls)