Guidance

International Climate Finance TA KPI 1: number of countries supported by ICF technical assistance

Published 1 March 2024

Purpose of the document

International Climate Finance (ICF) is Official Development Assistance (ODA) from the UK to support developing countries to reduce poverty and respond to the causes and impacts of climate change. These investments help developing countries to:

• adapt and build resilience to the current and future effects of climate change
• pursue low-carbon economic growth and development
• protect, restore and sustainably manage nature
• accelerate the clean energy transition

ICF is spent by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). This methodology note explains how to calculate one of the key performance indicators (KPI) that we use to measure the achievements of UK ICF.

The intended audience is ICF programme teams, results leads, climate analysts and our programme implementing partners. Visit International Climate Finance to learn more about UK International Climate Finance and its results, and read case studies.

Rationale

Technical assistance (TA) forms an important part of the UK Government’s International Climate Finance (ICF) programming, both through specific TA programmes, such as UKPACT (Partnering for Accelerated Climate Transitions), and as one component of broader programmes alongside financial policy support, capital investment or other interventions, for example FCDO’s Results Based Financing for Low Carbon Energy Access.

Most monitoring and reporting approaches currently assume capital spending, either implicitly or explicitly, and so are not well suited for tracking the activities and performance of TA activities or programmes. Additionally, ICF TA is often provided alongside other support such as capital investment from the UK Government or another development partner, TA support from other organisations, and national government financial and technical contributions. This makes it more challenging or even impossible to isolate results that are specifically attributable to ICF TA support. The UK Government has therefore developed a series of new indicators to support the measurement of ICF TA’s contributions to results ^{[footnote 1]}.

The ICF TA KPI 1 indicator seeks to provide a high-level assessment of the breadth of coverage of ICF TA support for climate action by measuring the number of countries that have received TA support from the ICF.

Summary table

[Column header]	[Column header]
Units	Absolute number and name of countries
Headline data to be reported	Number of countries supported by ICF TA: Individual countries supported
Disaggregations	sector; type of TA support; actor that support has been provided to; mitigation or adaptation theme
Revision history	January 2026: Added DSIT to relevant sections; Included additional guidance on counting countries for in-year and cumulative reporting; Added a ‘both’ option for mitigation/adaptation theme; Editorial changes to improve clarity and consistency. February 2023: clarified the requirement to report which country/countries have been supported as a disaggregation; further clarified that a country can receive any level of support to be counted in ICF TA KPI 1 results; included additional guidance on the supplementary information to include within the notes; included additional disaggregation categories; updated worked example template to report against multiple disaggregation categories
Timing	When to report: ICF programmes will be required to report ICF results once each year in March. Consider how much time is needed to collect data required to report ICF results and plan accordingly. It is recommended the data is collected alongside the programmes annual review where possible. Reporting lags: Programme may have produced results estimates earlier in the year, for example during your programme’s Annual Review. It is acceptable to provide these results as long as they were produced in the 12 months preceding the March results commission. In some cases, data required for producing results estimates will be available after the results were achieved. If results cannot be estimated until over a year away from when a results estimate will be produced, this should be noted in the results return.

Technical definition

This indicator counts the number of countries where there are direct and targeted beneficiaries from ICF TA programming, to measure the breadth and reach of that 7 programming. This indicator accounts for all forms of TA delivered, ranging from training workshops to knowledge products to feasibility studies.

This is an output level indicator and therefore does not aim to measure the success, effectiveness, or impact of that TA support. These should be assessed through other indicators or evaluations.

Technical assistance

Technical assistance is a form of non-financial development assistance provided by specialists, which may be either local or international and from the public sector, private sector, NGOs, or academia. This assistance can be provided in many forms, including sharing information and expertise, providing training, sharing technical data, or providing access to data platforms, and consulting services. It contrasts with other forms of assistance such as capital investments or grants to support the ongoing operating costs of a programme or initiative. TA may be provided directly by ICF or through funding that allows beneficiaries to purchase TA services.

TA can be provided in many different ways and can serve many different purposes. TA services and products typically include:

• supporting individuals in gaining knowledge or capacity through training, workshops, conferences
• sharing information and advice through knowledge products, support for project planning or policy development, providing data or climate information
• sharing experience through knowledge shares and secondments, expert guidance, study tours

See Annex B for full definitions of TA products and services and of the behavioural or organisational changes that ICF TA has typically aimed to support, based on a 2019 review of DESNZ’s portfolio of international TA support.

ICF support

ICF support refers to assistance provided by a UK Government ICF programme that has contributed to climate action in a specific country. It does not include a qualification based on the volume of funding provided by ICF or whether UK Government is the sole provider of support. Therefore, a programme that has provided a single TA activity in a given country would count that country as being supported for the purposes of reporting against ICF TA KPI 1 and would report the country every year the activity continues to operate.

Countries

For the purposes of this indicator, a country is a legal entity that is recognised by the UK Government ^{[footnote 2]}. The countries themselves must be listed in the reporting against ICF TA KPI 1 to enable aggregation and enable the ICF portfolio as a whole to report on the total number of countries that have been supported.

Methodological summary

To determine the number of countries supported by ICF TA, programmes should follow the approach set out below:

1. Determine which countries (if any) have been supported by ICF TA.
2. Count the number of countries supported for each disaggregation category (where available).
3. Report number and names of countries supported by ICF TA against appropriate disaggregation categories.

Methodology

To calculate the number of countries supported by ICF TA:

1. Determine which countries (if any) have been supported by ICF TA

Before quantifying the number of countries supported, programmes should verify that the TA support provided can be classified as having supported a country.

Programmes should include countries to which TA has been delivered with the intention of supporting climate action in the country. This TA may be provided to the public sector, the private sector (including formal and informal entrepreneurs, smallholder farmers and households), academia, and/or NGOs/civil society. Programmes should only include cases where there are both direct and targeted beneficiaries of ICF TA in a country:

• direct beneficiaries are defined as individuals or organisations that are the recipients of TA support. For example, people receiving training, a company being supported with specialist expertise, individuals attending the conference
• targeted beneficiaries are defined as individuals or organisations that are the intended recipients of TA support. This means those beneficiaries who were explicitly targeted by the programme to support climate action in a country

Programmes should verify whether support is direct and targeted based on programme design and implementation documents, validated by details on how the TA support has been provided in practice within the programme. The point at which the country can be reported is after the TA activity has occurred and in every year support continues to be provided.

Although specific beneficiaries may not have been identified at the business case or original design stage, they need to be identified before the TA activity was delivered. For example, those who were specifically invited, in advance, to participate in training schemes and/or workshops are targeted beneficiaries.

Programmes should not include cases where countries have been indirectly supported through ICF TA. Indirectly supported countries are those where beneficiaries were either untargeted and/or indirect recipients of TA.

• indirect beneficiaries are those who benefit from the TA but did not receive any TA. For example, a Peruvian ministry receives ICF TA to create an energy efficient Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in the centre of the country, after a couple of years the same Peruvian ministry decides to create a second SEZ on its border with Ecuador in collaboration with an Ecuadorian ministry, to whom they transfer the knowledge of how to create an energy efficient SEZ. While Ecuador has indirectly benefitted from ICF 9 technical assistance, it did not receive any itself, and hence should not be counted as having been supported

• untargeted beneficiaries refer to those who receive the TA but for which it was not intended or there is no expectation for climate action. For example:

  • a workshop is organised on forestry data management for the ministry of forests in Ivory Coast, but it is open to anyone who is interested in the subject area, and some PhD students from Ghana attend the workshop. The PhD students are untargeted beneficiaries and Ghana should not be counted
  • a large networking conference organised with the intention of sharing experiences with Malaysian civil servants working on energy access. The conference is also attended by Bangladeshi civil servants. The Bangladeshi civil servants are untargeted, and Bangladesh should not be counted

However, sometimes TA is intentionally designed to support other beneficiaries, for example ‘train-the-trainer’ programmes or supporting households through delivering support to one adult in the household.

In the cases where this is a specific design feature, that is, the TA is provided to a person with the specific intention of the TA being transmitted to other targeted beneficiaries in a specific country with the aim of supporting climate action in that country, then the programme can consider the secondary targeted beneficiaries as both direct and targeted and can report the countries supported within this indicator.

In the example of a train-the-trainer programme in which educators are trained in sustainable forestry practices to then deliver this training to wood producers across Brazil and Peru, both Brazil and Peru could be included in the number of countries supported.

2. Count the number of countries supported for each disaggregation category (where available)

For all countries where programmes have determined that they have provided direct and targeted TA support, programmes should count the number of countries supported and names of those countries. The latter is important to avoid double-counting at the ICF portfolio level. Programmes should count countries every year they continue to receive direct and targeted support.

Programmes should not count countries more than once in their results, even if they have received several different interventions within or across programmes. For example, the Government of Colombia receives training to implement an IT system that improves their operational efficiency in enforcing a climate regulation, and a Colombian cooperative received support to develop a project plan. Colombia should only be counted once.

Programmes may be able to count countries as being supported even if the TA support is delivered outside that country. For example, if an ICF programme convenes a regional workshop in one country which is used to deliver training to support government ministry representatives from multiple countries, this should be recognised as supporting all attending countries not just the country where the TA is delivered. However, in these cases programmes must still ensure they only include direct and targeted beneficiaries, as set out above.

For programmes with a specific regional or global focus, programmes should only count those countries where TA support has been specifically targeted to a beneficiary from that 10 country. For example, a programme that produces a knowledge product sharing details on regional climate impacts for general consumption should not automatically count all countries in the region as having been supported by ICF TA.

3. Report number and names of countries supported by ICF TA against appropriate disaggregation categories

Report the number of countries supported by ICF TA for each individual year to date and cumulatively.

Programmes should list all individual countries supported both for individual year and cumulative reporting. Note that for individual year results, countries should only be included if they have received TA support in that year. For example, a regional programme may target multiple countries, but only support a subset of those countries in any given year – and only those countries supported in that year should be included in annual reporting.

Conversely, a programme that works in a country across multiple years should record the country every year the country is supported. In the same example above, a regional programme targets multiple countries but only one of them receives support every year, and that country should be included in annual reporting every year it receives support.

Programmes should disaggregate reported data based on the beneficiary that has received the TA support: public sector actors, private sector actors, NGO/civil society actors, or academia.

Programmes should also provide evidence supporting their calculations in notes accompanying reported data on how the programme determined that ICF TA support has provided direct and targeted support to countries.

Programmes including a country that has been supported as secondary targeted beneficiaries in their reporting should specify the link between the ICF TA product or service, the secondary targeted beneficiaries and climate action intended in the country supported.

Programmes should record data against the following disaggregation categories, where the data is available:

• sector
• type of TA support
• actor that support has been provided to
• mitigation or adaptation theme, or both

Further details on these disaggregation categories are available in Annex A: Data disaggregation below.

Worked example

An ICF-funded programme focused in South Asia is supporting the development of off-grid energy access. It does this in the form of capital investments as well as TA. The TA aims to foster an enabling environment for the deployment of these technologies.

Over the course of its first 2 years the programme has delivered the following forms of TA:

• in year 1, direct and targeted support to financial institutions in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal with the aim of helping them adapt to these new kinds of products
• in year 1, direct and targeted support to the departments of energy in India, Thailand and Bangladesh
• in year 1, direct and targeted support to potential users in India, Bangladesh and Nepal
• in year 2, direct and targeted support to financial institutions in India, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Cambodia
• in year 2, direct and targeted support to the departments of energy in Vietnam and Thailand
• in year 2, direct and targeted support to potential users in Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia

1. Determine which countries (if any) have been supported by ICF TA

Only the countries with direct and targeted beneficiaries should be counted as supported by ICF TA.

If other countries have indirectly benefited from ICF TA they should not be counted. For example, in year 2, a study for Bangladesh looked at the regional experiences, which included ground work in Myanmar and engagement with policymakers. The policymakers benefited from this engagement in the form of knowledge about what other countries were doing. However no individual or organisation has been directly supported and targeted, therefore Myanmar should not be included in the number of countries supported by ICF TA as it is only an indirect beneficiary.

2. Count the number of countries supported for each disaggregation category (where available)

To determine the number of countries supported, the programme should count and record the name of countries where there are direct and targeted beneficiaries, and for which reporting year(s) they have received TA support.

In the example above, the following countries have been supported:

• in year 1: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Thailand
• in year 2: India, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam

Individual year reporting includes every country that received TA support in that specific year. In this example, 5 countries are recorded for year 1 and 6 for year 2.

Cumulative reporting includes each country that received support at any point across the lifetime of the programme. In this example, the cumulative total is 8. India, Bangladesh and Thailand appear in both years but are only counted once in the cumulative total.

3. Report number and names of countries supported by ICF TA against appropriate disaggregation categories

Programmes should list all individual countries supported both for individual year and cumulative reporting.

Programmes should disaggregate reported data based on the beneficiary that has received the TA support: public sector actors, private sector actors, NGO/civil society actors, or academia.

Example of how to report on this indicator

Year 1

Country	Sector	Actor	Type of TA	Theme
Bangladesh	Energy supply	Private sector	Project development support	Mitigation
Cambodia
India		Multiple sectors	Multiple types	Adaptation
Malaysia
Pakistan	Energy supply	NGO/civil society	Financing support	Mitigation
Vietnam

Total countries supported by ICF TA: 5

Year 2

Country	Sector	Actor	Type of TA	Theme
Bangladesh	Energy supply	Private sector	Project development support	Mitigation
Cambodia	Waste management	Private sector
India		Multiple sectors	Institutional capacity-building	Adaptation
Malaysia	Industrial processes	Public sector	Institutional capacity-building	Mitigation
Pakistan
Vietnam	Multiple sectors	Private sector	Institutional capacity-building	Mitigation

Total countries supported by ICF TA: 6

Cumulative total countries supported by ICF TA: 8

The programme should also provide evidence of TA being delivered to direct and targeted beneficiaries for each category in the table.

Data quality

Some data will be available directly from programmes, for example from project-level monitoring. It is the responsibility of the recipients of ICF funding, or a third-party auditing entity, to collect data. This information will need to be kept up to date by liaising with programme managers.

Portfolio ICF results are published annually following the UK statistics authority Code of Practice for Statistics. This means that we make efforts to maximise the trustworthiness, quality, and value of the statistics.

To support ICF data quality:

1. Review ICF KPI results provided by programme partners, ensuring that methodologies have been adhered to, and calculations are documented and correct.

2. Ask a suitable analyst or climate adviser to quality assure ICF results before submission.

3. Submit ICF results following the instructions specific to your department. Include supporting documentation of calculations and any concerns about data quality.

4. A revision to historical results may be needed if programme monitoring systems or methodologies are improved, or historical data errors are found. Update results for earlier years as necessary and make a note in the return. ICF results are reported cumulatively, therefore it is important to make these corrections.

Questions about results reporting can be discussed with central ICF analysts, who undertake a further stage of quality assurance before publication.

Annex A: Data disaggregation

It is recommended that the data is disaggregated by the following categories, where available:

Sector

Emissions reductions / avoided should be disaggregated by sector as defined by the UNFCCC Inventory Categories:

• energy supply
• industrial processes
• business
• public
• residential
• transport
• agriculture
• fisheries and aquaculture
• waste management
• forestry
• land/sea-use and land/sea-use change
• water

Type of TA support

The categories of TA support are based on a review of existing DESNZ TA and a sample of FCDO TA, classified by the goal the TA aims to support.

Capacity building

• institutional capacity building: building capacity by improving institutional processes within organisations or helping establish new institutions
• technical capacity building: building capacity by improving technical expertise within organisations

Policy support and evidence

• awareness raising: bringing attention to a certain programme, project, cause, or issue
• national policy support: assisting in the design, update, or operation of a national policy in a supported country
• international policy support: Assisting in the design, update, or operation of an international policy

Project and investment support

• project development support: providing assistance to develop projects more quickly or more effectively
• process/asset operation support: providing guidance to improve operational aspects of stakeholder
• financing support: providing assistance to developing financial offerings, financial instrument or arrange access to finance
• public-private co-ordination support: supporting collaboration between public and private actors for the development of climate-relevant investments

Actor that has received support

Programmes should disaggregate reported data based on the actor that has received support from ICF technical assistance.

• public sector: public sector actors such as national governments, sub-national regional or local governments, governmental agencies or other public bodies

• private sector: private sector such as businesses, financial institutions, smallholder farmers and private actors, such as households. For private actors operating across multiple countries, the reporting country should be determined on where the TA is expected to have an impact

• finance sector: finance sector such as financial institutions, banking and capital markets

• NGO/civil society: NGOs, philanthropic organisations, or civil society groups. For organisations operating across multiple countries, the reporting country should be determined on where the TA is expected to have an impact

• academia: academic institutions or organisations. Where programmes have supported multiple categories of actors, programmes should report each type of actor supported for the given country – but should take care to avoid double-counting when reporting aggregate country-level results.

Mitigation or adaptation theme

Policies should be disaggregated according to the climate change theme supported by the policy:

• climate change adaptation
• climate change mitigation or
• both adaptation and mitigation

Definitions of climate change adaptation and mitigation should be based on those included in the ‘OECD DAC Rio Markers for Climate Handbook’ ^{[footnote 3]}.

Annex B: Common forms of technical assistance in ICF programmes

Technical assistance is a broad term and includes a diverse set of means and aims of support. This annex defines the different types of TA products and services typically offered in ICF programmes (what is provided in practice) and common categories of TA support (what the TA aims to achieve).

Common TA products and services TA can be provided in many different ways and to serve many different purposes. TA services and products typically include:

• supporting individuals in gaining knowledge or capacity through training, workshops, conferences
• sharing information through knowledge products, support for project planning or policy development, providing data or climate information
• sharing experience through knowledge shares and secondments, expert guidance, study tours

The table below provides an indication of where different TA products and services are most useful across those 3 areas.

TA product or service	Description	Supporting individuals	Sharing information	Sharing experience
Workshops	Presentations or discussions among small- or medium-sized groups	x	x	x
Training events and courses	Events or courses aimed to build understanding or capacity, can be one-off or a course of training, conducted externally or in-house	x	x
Conferences, seminars or networking events	Larger forums to share information and/or foster relationships between different actors	x	x
Secondments	Providing personnel to augment capacity, including short- or longer-term placements	x		x
Specialist research	Traditional consultancy-type services that address specific, practical questions and provide recommendations, including market, policy, legal, regulatory and technology research briefs		x	x
Strategic organisational guidance	Operational plans and systems eg HR planning		x	x
Expert guidance and review	Ad-hoc expert input on different issues, including direct provision of guidance and recruitment or provision of long-term expert staff		x	x
Product or technology demonstration	Demonstration of certain products or technologies to build understanding among users or policymakers		x	x
Study tours and roadshows	Educational or informational trips for beneficiaries to learn from others, including on technology use, technical and business practices and policy approaches		x	x
Public awareness campaigns	Engagement with civil society and/or the public to build awareness		x
High-level delegations	Engagement on ministerial or equivalent level to build high-level political interest	x	x	x
Data, software, tools and models	An output that can be used to support decision-making, typically across multiple decisions		x
Research and development	Research and development (R&D) services, may include commercial or academic research		x

Annex C: Guidance on the use of this indicator methodology to support appraisals

The results from this indicator are not directly suitable for incorporation into a traditional cost-benefit analysis appraisal, as results – the number of countries supported – are not calculated in a monetised format and cannot easily be converted into monetary terms using typical appraisal techniques (such as willingness to pay analysis).

However, expected results could be used as an input to modified or alternative appraisal approaches, such as cost-effectiveness analysis (based on the unit cost of achieving results in supporting countries) or multicriteria analysis.

To apply the methodology set out in this indicator to generate estimated results for the purposes of appraisal, users should:

• examine the programme design to identify where and how they expect each element of programme TA may support different actors in different countries. Users should first consider all elements of TA included in the programme design separately and consider which different organisations and/or individuals this TA product or service may support. In considering these instances, users should set out how they expect that the TA will support the organisations and/or individuals
  • for some programmes it may be challenging to identify the range of specific beneficiaries that will be supported at the design stage, particularly if programmes are designed to be demand-led and/or responsive to needs that emerge over time. In these cases, programmes may need to make assumptions around the number of countries that will be supported based on the level of reach that is feasible given the programme design and budget
• aggregate the instances of countries informed to obtain an overall estimate of programme expected results. Users should take account of any cases where different TA products are offered to the same organisations or individuals – particularly in the case of repeated training, workshops, conferences, where the aim is to engage with the same (individual and organisational) beneficiaries over time

Use of these results as inputs to cost-effectiveness analysis or multi-criteria analysis should be carefully considered and may require users to more clearly specify the expected outputs to ensure comparability across different programmes. Given that many different types and scales of TA support may be provided to countries, use of this indicator as the basis for decision making may risk prioritising programmes that have a broad reach (in terms of supporting a large number of different countries) above those that deliver the largest impact, in terms of the quality, duration or depth of support within countries.

Acknowledgements

This document has been updated by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and Department for Energy Security and Net Zero to reflect methodological changes following a pilot of the methodology produced by Vivid Economics with the assistance of the UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, contracted through the EACDS Lot B service ‘Strengthening resilience and response to crises’, managed by DAI Europe Ltd. under contract to the UK Department for International Development. The original draft technical assistance methodology note is available from Devtracker.

This document builds on one of 5 draft Methodology Notes for new indicators for tracking results from technical assistance within ICF programmes, produced under the project Understanding Technical Assistance Options in International Climate Finance. The Vivid Economics project team includes Nick Kingsmill, Aurore Mallon, Fabian Knoedler-Thoma, John Ward and Dan Aylward-Mills.

Following the pilot of these new indicators, 4 of these have been taken forwards for reporting across ICF programmes as part of the annual results reporting.

1. Non-TA ICF KPIs take an attribution approach to reporting results, where programmes identify that they have had a causal role supporting results and then attribute results across ICF and any other development partners that have also played a causal role, based on the value of support provided to a programme. As strict attribution is very challenging or impossible for TA support, these indicators take a contribution approach by measuring the total volume of results that ICF TA has contributed to delivering. Further details on attribution, additionality and contribution can be found in the supplementary guidance. ↩

2. A full list of officially recognised countries can be found here: Country Names.csv ↩

3. DAC Network on Environment and Development Co-operation. ↩