On a July morning in 2025, as Atlantic waves hit the shore of Saly, Senegal, more than 60 officials from 34 African countries filed into a hotel conference room to talk about what they had already lost.
They came from lowlying islands, droughtstricken hinterlands and floodprone river basins, carrying stories of washedout roads, dead livestock and villages slowly disappearing into the sea.
For three days, the group, drawn fromleast developed countries and small island developing states across Africa, worked through a new United Nations process with a long name and an ambitious mandate: theSantiago Networkfor averting, minimizing and addressing loss and damage.
The workshop’s purpose was practical: help governments turn their climate scars into concrete, technically sound requests for assistance that the network could then match with experts and institutions around the world.
Senegal’s role was not incidental. The meeting was hosted by Dakar and organized by the Santiago Network Secretariat and the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, with Senegal cast as both convenor and test case for how African states can shape the stillyoung system for loss and damage.
As UN climate diplomacy enters a new phase, one that must move beyond promises of future mitigation to confront harms already locked in, who leads and who speaks for Africa inside that system has taken on new significance.
A New Nerve Center for Loss and Damage
The Santiago Network was formally established at the 2019 UN climate summit in Madrid and later operationalized through a series of decisions under the Paris Agreement.
Its mission is narrow but pivotal: to “catalyze” technical assistance for vulnerable developing countries, drawing on a web of organizations, bodies, networks and experts, so that governments can better avert, minimize and address loss and damage from climate change.
In practice, that makes the network a kind of nerve center between frontline ministries and the global climate bureaucracy. A government facing repeated coastal erosion or slowonset drought can submit a request; the Secretariat then works with an Advisory Board and partner organizations to identify what is needed, from risk models and legal advice on relocations to socialprotection design, and who can provide it.
The Advisory Board, whose members are drawn from regional groups and constituencies under the UN climate convention, elected Angela Rivera and Stella BrożekEveraert, both members of the Warsaw International Mechanism’s Executive Committee, as its cochairs at a 2025 meeting in Geneva.
In a joint statement, they described 2025 as “a defining year” for turning the network from a political promise into a functioning channel of support.
For African governments, the stakes are acute. The continent is already experiencing some of the world’s fastestrising climate risks, from sealevel rise along the Gulf of Guinea to intensifying heat and drought in the Sahel, with limited fiscal space to respond.
The emerging Loss and Damage Fund, agreed at successive climate conferences, will not achieve much if countries cannot access the expertise needed to design and implement projects. The Santiago Network is meant to close that gap.
Africa’s Voice, Europe’s Purse
A growing partnership between African and European actors is also shaping expectations around the network’s future role. While Senegal has not held the gavel itself, its diplomats and experts have pushed from within the Advisory Board and wider UN climate process for a Santiago Network that responds to African priorities rather than donor fashions.
At the same time, Germany and other European Union members, represented in part through cochair Stella BrożekEveraert, have signaled that they see the network as a key technical gateway linking vulnerable countries to expertise and, eventually, to finance from the Loss and Damage Fund and development banks.
For African least developed countries and small island states, that mix of African convening power and European funding influence could either produce a more balanced system, or entrench an older pattern in which those who control the money still shape what counts as “technical assistance” and which requests move to the front of the queue.
For African governments, the stakes are acute. The contine nt is already experiencing some of the world’s fastestrising climate risks, from sealevel rise along the Gulf of Guinea to intensifying heat and drought in the Sahel, with limited fiscal space to respond.
The emerging Loss and Damage Fund, agreed at successive climate conferences, will not achieve much if countries cannot access the expertise needed to design and implement projects. The Santiago Network is meant to close that gap.
Senegal’s Turn at the Front of the Room
In Saly, Senegal’s officials made clear they see their country as more than a gracious host. Opening the workshop,Colonel Pape Assane Ndour, first technical adviser to the minister of environment and ecological transition, called it “of paramount importance, not only for our country, but for all LDCs and SIDS in Africa,” according to the Santiago Network’s account of the event.
The gathering, he said, was about the “technical assistance our vulnerable countries urgently need to respond to the impacts of climate change.”
Over the following days, participants mapped out their most pressing needs. The workshop notes speak of shared gaps: patchy climate and socioeconomic data, weak national coordination on loss and damage, limited understanding of legal and humanrights dimensions of relocation, and major barriers to accessing international finance.
A “writeshop” session walked delegations through drafting actual technicalassistance requests, line by line, with facilitators stressing that the goal was countryled priorities, not donor wish lists.
Senegal’s leadership in hosting the first dedicated Santiago Network workshop for African least developed countries and small island states built on years of activism in lossanddamage debates.
Figures like Madeleine Diouf Sarr, who chaired the bloc of least developed countries in the climate talks, have repeatedly pressed industrialized nations to, in her words, “breathe life into the Santiago Network” and move beyond symbolic recognition of loss.
From Dakar’s perspective, putting Africa at the center of the network’s early work is both a matter of justice and of leverage.
By convening peers, the country helps ensure that the first wave of assistance requests reflects African realities: collapsed riverbank schools in the Niger Basin, encroaching saltwater in West African deltas, pastoralists in the Horn forced into precarious migration.
It also gives Senegal and its allies more voice when the Advisory Board and Secretariat decide how to prioritize scarce time and resources.
Hope, Caution, and The Road Ahead
Supporters of the Santiago Network argue that its design, a standing Secretariat, a representative Advisory Board, a mandate tightly linked to the Loss and Damage Fund, gives vulnerable countries new tools to demand practical help rather than generic capacitybuilding. The Saly workshop, they say, showed what is possible when African officials are given space and support to define their own needs before consultants and development banks arrive with readymade templates.
Yet caution is widespread. Civilsociety groups have warned that, without sustained pressure from developingcountry representatives, the network could drift toward a familiar pattern: short missions, glossy reports and pilot projects that never scale.
In a joint call, women’s and genderjustice organizations urged governments to operationalize an “effective” Santiago Network that centers communities and does not reduce loss and damage to a technical bookkeeping exercise.
There are also questions about capacity on the UN side. The Secretariat, cohosted by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and the UN Office for Project Services and led fromGeneva by Director Carolina Fuentes Castellanos, is still relatively small.
Its latest activity report notes that, alongside highprofile workshops, it has begun bilateral briefings with national liaisons and is processing the first batch of formal requests from vulnerable countries. How quickly those turn into visible support, and where, will shape perceptions of the network’s credibility.
For African states, Senegal’s early role offers both an opening and a responsibility. By anchoring the first regional workshop and keeping loss and damage high on the diplomatic agenda, Dakar has helped set expectations that African ministries will not just receive technical assistance but help define what effective assistance looks like.
Whether that promise holds will be judged far from the meeting rooms of Geneva and Saly. It will be tested in coastal communities deciding whether to retreat from rising seas, in farmers’ cooperatives rebuilding after unprecedented floods, and in small island states fighting to protect fresh water and cultural sites as storms intensify.
On Senegal’s Atlantic shore, as delegates packed up flip charts and draft requests last July, the official communiqués spoke of “driving countryled climate action in Africa.”
In the years ahead, African governments and communities will be watching to see if the Santiago Network, with Senegal so visible in its early steps, can turn that hopeful language into the kind of grounded, longterm support that makes a difference where climate losses are already a daily reality.
