The past few years have seen a proliferation of international climate finance schemes to help communities cope with the threat of climate change while also combating its root causes, but this landscape is problematic. Many of the strict financial accountability mechanisms employed by climate finance schemes make it difficult, slow and sometimes prohibitively expensive for stakeholders in developing countries to access climate funds, despite the dynamism and potential of many of these applicants. This paper examines potential solutions and lessons from our design of the SCIP fund.