Shubhi Goyal on Why Climate Finance Never Reaches the People It's Meant to Serve

On April 25, 2015, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck Nepal, killing nearly nine thousand people and triggering one of the largest humanitarian response operations in the country's history. Pledges were made. Reconstruction frameworks were written.

Financing was mobilized. But in the neighborhoods of Kathmandu where the damage was deepest, the communities bearing the consequences had no role in deciding how recovery resources were prioritized, structured, or tracked. The capital moved. Whether it arrived remained, as it so often does, unanswered.

Shubhi Goyal had grown up in that city.

"That earthquake was one rupture among many," she says. "I trained as an architect because I believed that if we designed stronger buildings and better structural systems, communities would be safer. It took years of field work to understand that the failure was less about the design of buildings and roads, and more about what was upstream: who designed and controlled project pipelines and financing systems, who made the decisions, whose knowledge counts, and who was left out.”

She moved from architecture into urban planning, then into climate policy and finance, developing a design, systems, and spatial lens that let her think across scales and connect the dots between policy, governance, and capital.

“I could for the first time see the global architecture of climate finance from the inside,” she says. And that was the point where the map came into focus. Not just where the money stalls, but why.”

The numbers are stark. Global climate finance now exceeds $2 trillion annually, yet only $65 billion, roughly three percent, is directed toward adaptation. Developing countries need between $284 and $339 billion annually to stay resilient. Of what does flow, a fraction reaches the communities most exposed to climate risk. The barriers are not only financial. Accessing climate finance requires technical proposals, multi-page applications, and reporting capacities that most frontline organizations do not have. The system was not designed for them.

That finding has held across every geography Goyal has worked in. In Accra, her vulnerability assessments using GIS and spatial data identified three-quarters of the city as high risk for coastal hazards, yet the local institutions most exposed had the least capacity to write the proposals that climate funds required. In Western North Carolina, she led post-Hurricane Helene recovery planning with two hundred frontline residents, developing a countywide resilience hub network aligned with $225 million in incoming federal funding. Local organizations still spent months mapping money and translating urgent community needs into donor formats that were never built for them. The geography changed. The gap did not.

"The field treats vulnerable communities as beneficiaries instead of co-designers," she says. "And it treats community participation as a checkbox. If the process doesn't build local capacity and shift decision-making power, the outcomes won't hold."

That diagnosis is now driving her most consequential work. At the Huairou Commission, a global network of grassroots women's organizations operating across 45 countries, Goyal is developing what the field has consistently lacked: systematic, scalable mechanisms for community-led accountability in climate finance. Working directly with nine grassroots organizations across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, she is documenting tested accountability practices and designing diagnostic tools that frontline organizations can deploy independently to track whether climate finance commitments translate into local action. The tools are built not for external evaluators but for the communities themselves: accessible, replicable, and grounded in the political and institutional realities each organization operates in. Her work supports the World Bank's Global Partnership for Social Accountability – the primary multilateral mechanism for integrating community voice into climate finance governance.

That conviction took its earliest institutional form at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where Goyal co-founded One Community with three other women from the Global South – a digital platform built to protect fifteen thousand informal businesses in Dharavi, Mumbai, from large-scale redevelopment and climate vulnerability. The platform was a finalist in the 2024 MIT IDEAS Social Innovation Challenge and part of the 2024 MITdesignX cohort. It was an early proof of concept for an approach she has carried into every subsequent engagement: that communities are not the end users of climate solutions. They are the starting point.

Goyal is increasingly interested in the role technology can play in extending that work. The tools being built for climate finance: open data platforms, AI-powered project identification, blockchain tracking, remote sensing, are almost exclusively designed for institutional users. They assume levels of technical capacity, legal standing, and information access that most frontline communities do not have.

"At Huairou, I am exploring how these tools can be redesigned from the community up," she says.

"A grassroots organization should be able to use geotagging to create a public record of whether a funded project actually materialized. Machine learning should be able to scan disbursement records and flag where money was committed but never arrived. Distributed ledger technology should give communities a transparent, verifiable record of every transaction, not just institutions. None of these tools were built with communities in mind. This is what I am trying to change.”

She is clear-eyed about the limits of technology in that work. AI and data integration can improve matchmaking between capital and opportunity. It cannot manufacture the policy environments, institutional capacity, or community data infrastructure that make projects viable in the first place.

"Technology can accelerate a system," she says. "It cannot build one that isn't there."

Shubhi’s work demonstrates that fixing climate finance requires changing who controls the infrastructure that moves capital from commitment to delivery. The system fails not because the money isn't there, but because the accountability structures carrying it were never built for the communities at the end of them. Goyal is working to change that, making climate finance transparent, traceable, and answerable to the people it was always supposed to serve.

For more information on Shubhi Goyal, visit LinkedIn.