AFRICA – The African Development Bank (AfDB) announced that it will double its climate finance commitments for the period 2020-2025 to at least US$25 billion.
The announcement was made by Akinwumi A. Adesina, the Bank’s President during the One Planet Summit in Nairobi Kenya.
Speaking at a plenary in the presence of Heads of State, including President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya, and French President Emmanuel Macron, Adesina also announced the Bank is on course to achieve its target of allocating 40% of its funding to climate finance by 2020, a year ahead.
The Bank’s commitment on the target, the highest among all multilateral development banks, has progressed steadily from 9% in 2016 to 28% in 2017 and 32% in 2018.
The African Development Bank has successfully raised its adaptation finance from less than 30% of total climate finance to parity with mitigation in 2018 as it pledges to continue this trend into the future.
“The required level of financing is only feasible with the direct involvement of the entire financial sector.
Consequently, the Bank launched the African Financial Alliance for Climate Change (AFAC) to link all stock exchanges, pension and sovereign wealth funds, central Banks and other financial institutions of Africa to mobilize and incentivize the shift of their portfolios towards low carbon and climate resilient investments,” said Adesina.
Additionally, Adesina said that the Bank is also to launch the ‘green baseload’ facility under the Sustainable Energy Fund for Africa (SEFA 2.0) in support of renewable energy adoption.
“It is not good enough to simply ask countries to stay away from polluting technologies.
“We have to be proactive in exploring alternatives. We will therefore be launching the ‘green baseload’ facility under the Sustainable Energy Fund for Africa (SEFA 2.0).
(this will) provide concessional finance and technical assistance to support the penetration and scale-up of renewable energy, to provide affordable and reliable renewable energy baseload,” Adesina said.
It was revealed that several donors, including Canada, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Italy, the UK and USAID have indicated their interest in this transformative instrument, which will also help to replace coal.
Additionally, the bank has pioneered the “Desert to Power” program, a US$10 billion initiative to build a 10 GW solar zone across the Sahel—the largest in the world— would provide electricity for 250 million people.
Other Key Bank projects include the co-financing of the 510 MW Ouarzazate Solar Complex in Morocco, one of the largest solar complexes in the world., doubling its commitments.
