As the GCF has increased its operational scale, the Secretariat’s responsibilities and activities have augmented in number and complexity, and over the course of the last two years, the Secretariat has grown from approximately 60 staff members to nearly 230.

The GCF’s Governing Instrument (GI) (Article 23, l) calls on the Secretariat to establish and run effective Knowledge Management (KM) practices. KM has become increasingly important as GCF grows and generates more information that needs to be captured, abstracted, categorized and channeled to its wide array of key stakeholders. The Secretariat’s various active engagements with countries and Accredited Entities (AEs) produce a wealth of country, project and climate knowledge which needs to be managed more effectively and efficiently, especially with respect to data and information capture, storage dissemination and usage.

In order to effectively deliver knowledge management systems and establish efficient practices, certain key challenges identified by the GCF staff must be addressed. These key challenges are mostly linked to the inability to find content and documents on the intranet system (SharePoint Online) due to insufficient search features and functions. In order to solve for the challenge of insufficient search features and functions, and to cope with the increasing complexity of information management, the GCF is seeking to establish and implement an organizational-wide taxonomy. In addition to these primary objectives, a set of secondary objectives based on enhanced efficiency, compliance and transparency have also been defined with the purpose of solving for some of the key challenges faced by the Secretariat when searching for and managing content.

The taxonomy management solution must therefore primarily seek to improve on search and findability of content and documents. Inconsistencies in terms and language have also been identified challenges to the staff, and should be addressed by the taxonomy by providing a ‘Single Source of Truth’ for all matters related to the terminology and language of the GCF.