Sudan Should Get a Seat at the Table While the Arab Green Fund Is Still Being Designed

A pooled Arab Green Fund for climate technology is still being designed ahead of COP31 — Sudan should get a seat at the table now, while the rules are still open.

3Bi Research Team | 22 September 2026

The Hook

Arab climate officials are quietly sketching the outlines of a new regional financing tool: a pooled Arab Green Fund to bankroll the technology transfer that developing economies need to cut emissions. It came up this week in an unlikely venue — a webinar, not a summit. On 22 September 2026, Dr. Naglaa Abdelkader of Egypt’s Nuclear Materials Authority, part of the Ministry of Electricity and Renewable Energy, told a virtual session convened under the Arab Initiative for Green Technology and AI that “technology transfer and localization has become inevitable for the global economy” — no longer a trade transaction between states, but a strategic pathway in its own right (attaqa.net, 22 September 2026).

The idea deserves more attention than a webinar usually gets, and not only because it is timed to the run-up to COP31 in Antalya, Türkiye, scheduled for 9–20 November 2026 (UNFCCC, “The Road to Antalya”). It deserves attention because the fund Dr. Abdelkader is describing — a shared Arab financing mechanism, a common regional market for green technology standards, and a linked network of Arab research centers — is still a proposal, not a program. Its eligibility rules, its governance, and its list of participating states are not yet fixed. That is precisely the window in which a state like Sudan, locked out of nearly every other regional climate-finance channel by three years of war, has a chance to shape the terms before they close.

The Argument

First, the technology-localization case is really an argument about historical responsibility — and it is one Sudan can use. Dr. Abdelkader was explicit that this is not just an economic or environmental question but an ethical one: industrialized states expanded rapidly after the two World Wars, and the emissions from that expansion are now driving the climate shocks developing economies must adapt to without having caused them (attaqa.net, 22 September 2026). That framing — used here to argue for freer technology transfer to the Arab world generally — is the same framing 3Bi has made in its own work on climate-finance access for Sudan specifically (3Bi, “Europe’s Adaptation Gap and Sudan’s Grants Window,” 19 August 2026). When a serving Egyptian government scientist makes the historical-responsibility case on a platform read across the region, it strengthens rather than duplicates Sudan’s own claim to be first in line, not last, for whatever financing follows.

Second, the proposed fund targets exactly the barriers that have kept Sudan out of the market so far. Dr. Abdelkader named the obstacles plainly: supply-chain and component monopolies held by advanced economies, a “green financing gap” for developing states reliant on weak public flows, harsh lending conditions attached by international institutions, intellectual-property restrictions that raise the cost of technology, and local regulatory environments not built for long-term technology investment (attaqa.net, 22 September 2026). Every one of those barriers applies to Sudan today with extra force — a banking system cut off by sanctions-adjacent restrictions, a legal and regulatory environment interrupted by war, and financing windows that assume a level of institutional continuity Sudan’s transitional authorities cannot always offer. A pooled Arab fund, deliberately designed around Arab states’ shared climate and environmental conditions rather than a single donor’s bilateral terms, is structurally more likely to have room for a state in Sudan’s position than the bilateral Gulf-financed deals 3Bi has tracked all year (see, for instance, 3Bi’s coverage of the Sudan-Egypt grid interconnection talks, 16 September 2026, and the Jordan-based solar financing window, 11 August 2026) — but only if Sudan is at the table for the design, not applying after the rules are set.

Third, the proposal comes with a concrete regional-integration agenda that a technical Sudanese voice could actually shape. Dr. Abdelkader called for three specific mechanisms: the green fund itself, a common Arab market for green technology built on unified environmental standards, and a network linking Arab research centers, universities, and laboratories to share solutions on shared regional problems — desertification, water desalination, and solar power among them (attaqa.net, 22 September 2026). None of these require Sudan to have a fully functioning central government to participate meaningfully. A research-center network is a standing invitation to Sudanese universities and technical institutions still operating despite the war. A common standards market is a place where Sudanese engineers rebuilding the Roseires, Sennar, and Merowe hydropower stations — the same rebuild 3Bi covered in its 21 September brief on Egyptian EPC capacity — could help set specifications rather than only receive them.

Why It Matters to You

If you are a donor or a multilateral climate-finance officer, the Arab Green Fund is worth tracking now, while its criteria are still being drafted, because a fund designed around shared Arab climate conditions is more likely than a bilateral instrument to have a workable pathway for a fragile or transitional state — but only if someone flags that need during design, not after launch. If you are part of Sudan’s technical, scientific, or civil-society community, this is a concrete, near-term opening: research-center partnerships and standards-setting processes do not wait for full government capacity, and getting Sudanese institutions named as participants in the network Dr. Abdelkader described costs far less, and moves far faster, than negotiating a bilateral financing deal from scratch.

Close

COP31 will produce headlines in November. The Arab Green Fund, if it moves from webinar to institution, will not be one of them — it will be built in exactly the kind of low-visibility technical meetings that produced this week’s session. That is normally where Sudan loses ground: absent from the room when the rules are written, present only when applying under someone else’s terms. This time, the room is still being furnished. The question for Sudan’s research institutions, transitional technical ministries, and diaspora scientific networks is not whether to wait for an invitation, but whether they can get a name on the list before the list closes.

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This piece was produced through 3Bi’s automated daily publications workflow monitoring regional and international climate reporting.

This publication is produced with support from 3Bi’s institutional donors; see the full funder list at 3bisudan.org.