Participants at the AfDB pavilion at the Second Africa Climate Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Credit: Farai Shawn Matiashe/IPS

By Farai Shawn Matiashe
ADDIS ABABA, Sep 16 2025 (IPS)

As increasingly frequent droughts and devastating floods are affecting agricultural productivity, leaving millions of people food insecure in Africa amid a lack of climate finance, the African Development Bank (AfDB) has committed USD 11 billion to support various climate-resilient and infrastructure projects in rural areas.

Climate change-induced humanitarian emergencies are materializing in every corner of the world. Often, more frequently than predicted. Over the past few years, many countries have been experiencing extreme weather events almost every month. Poor countries like those in Africa emerged as the worst affected, bearing the brunt of climate change.

Africa warmed faster than the rest of the world, according to a report released last year by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The Horn of Africa, as well as Southern and Northwest Africa, suffered from exceptional multi-year droughts recently, while other African countries reported significant casualties due to extreme precipitation leading to floods in 2023.

Targeting Climate Action Projects

James Kinyangi, coordinator of the Climate and Development Special Fund and the Climate Action Window at AfDB, said they are providing funding for various climate adaptation and mitigation projects across Africa.

“AfDB has several ways in which they are tackling climate challenges and integrating finance for climate action in its portfolio. Last year, we had total approvals for projects in African countries for about USD 11 billion,” he told IPS in an interview at the AfDB Pavilion during the Second Africa Climate Summit (ACS2) held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, from 8 to 10 September. The summit took place in anticipation of the United Nations Climate Conference (COP30), in Belém, Brazil, scheduled for November 2025.

“Out of that, close to half was mainstream climate finance. Of the nearly USD 5 billion that went to climate finance, nearly 65 percent was adaptation finance. The remaining was mitigation.”

Kinyangi said they have a mainstream of climate finance for climate action in their main portfolio, making sure that all of the lending of the bank responds to climate action.

“We also screen our projects. Now, nearly 100 percent of all new approvals of the bank are mainstream with climate action. They are climate-informed designs of projects,” he said.

Kinyangi, an AfDB early warning expert, says they also have various special funds and trust funds that respond to climate change.

“One that is visible is through our major constitutional lending window, the African Development Fund. We have created the Climate Action Window, which has mobilized a total of USD 500 million as climate finance,” he said. “That has now been programmed for 37 low-income African countries that benefit from the resources of the African Development Fund. We have about 41 projects that are adaptation and we have another 18 projects that are mitigation.”

The cost of climate adaptation in sub-Saharan Africa would be between USD 30 and 50 billion annually over the next decade, according to the WMO. This is a huge blow to a continent where 118 million extremely poor people have a daily income of less than USD 1.90 per day. If adequate climate funding is not secured in time, farmers in the rural areas will be poorer by 2030 as national budgets continue to be diverted.

AfDB’s investments in Africa cut across energy, agriculture, water resources and sanitation, forestry, climate information systems, and green projects seeking finance to help transform mitigation pathways. Kinyangi said several of these projects are designed to support rural communities, including early warning systems, climate-smart agriculture and clean cooking solutions.

In the Sahel region, AfDB is supporting a project called Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR), a low-cost, sustainable approach where farmers protect and manage the natural growth of trees and shrubs on their agricultural lands, rather than planting new ones. The practice restores degraded soil and increases agricultural yields, improving food security.

As part of their climate-smart agricultural projects, AfDB is supporting 20 million farmers across Africa. Kinyangi said AfDB is supporting technologies like drought insurance for the management of risks associated with losses of livestock and crops due to drought. He said the result is a whole host of technologies they are financing in rural communities across Africa, supporting farmers with water harvesting and renewable energy.

In Zimbabwe, for instance, AfDB is working with the International Fund for Agricultural Development, a United Nations agency working to eliminate poverty and hunger in rural areas and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to support school feeding programs for children.

“This includes improving cooking equipment in schools and improving the delivery of vaccines and other medications through rural dispensaries by use of cold chains powered by solar, ” said Kinyangi. Across Africa, AfDB is revamping irrigation projects, changing from diesel-powered to solar-powered systems to reduce emissions.

Bridging the Financing Gap for Countries in Debt Distress

Several African countries that are exposed to extreme weather events like droughts and floods divert their national budgets to respond to these disasters. These are funds meant for the health and education sectors, which are diverted to support affected communities and rebuild destroyed infrastructure. To fill the financing gap, they turn to multinational lenders like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which leaves them in debt.

Efforts have been made in the past to restructure debt through the G20 Common Framework, which was created during the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 as a debt relief effort. But African leaders say it is slow and creditor-driven. Five years after it was established, only Ghana and Zambia have managed to restructure their debt under the G20 Common Framework.

Between 2010 and 2020, Africa’s external debt increased more than fivefold and accounted for almost 65% of Gross Domestic Product in 2023. Even though Africa’s average debt-to-GDP ratio is expected to decrease to 60% in 2025, the continent faces an escalating debt crisis, according to the African Union. Statistics from the IMF and World Bank’s Debt Sustainability Framework show that African countries in distress, or at high risk of debt distress, have risen from 9 in 2012 to 25 in 2024.

Kinyangi said the AfDB Climate Action Window was established to help countries in debt distress.

“For example, countries like Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe are exposed to tropical cyclones in the Indian Ocean. So, they divert national resources to combat the negative impacts of tropical cyclones. That leaves them in a budget hole. Sometimes they have to borrow to leave that budget hole.”

Kinyangi said AfDB’s aspirations are to ensure that it channels more climate finance to vulnerable countries to cushion those countries against having to divert important national budgets to combat the impacts of climate change. He said climate finance is supposed to go directly to building resilience against the negative impacts of extreme weather events while preserving the national budget that is meant to create education systems and promote health and infrastructure.

The AfDB was among the African banks that have committed to mobilizing USD 100 billion to fund green industrial projects at the ACS2. While a copy of the final declaration from the three-day Addis Ababa Summit is yet to be released, African leaders set a new goal to raise USD 50 billion annually for climate solutions. In 2023, about USD 26 billion was mobilized at the ACS1 in Nairobi, Kenya, but it is not clear how much funding has been disbursed. The continent needs USD 1.3 trillion per year to finance its climate adaptation plans, according to the AU.

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Winnie Wambui, co-founder of Harcourt Agri-Eco Farm in Kenya, speaks to IPS outside the Dealroom at the Africa Food Systems Forum 2025, held at the Centre International de Conférences Abdou Diouf (CICAD) in Dakar, Senegal, September 4, 2025. Credit: Chemtai Kirui/IPS

By Chemtai Kirui
DAKAR, Sep 15 2025 (IPS)

Winnie Wambui leans forward on the panel stage, microphone in hand, scanning the room until she spots a raised hand.

Everyone in the room wears headphones, each voice isolated so that discussions don’t clash with sessions in adjacent halls. A question cuts through: how did a student science project become a commercial business?

At 24, Wambui, a Kenyan agripreneur, runs Harcourt Agri-Eco Farm, which recycles organic waste into animal feed using black soldier flies.

“Back then, I didn’t know it would become a farm or a business,” she said to a room of agripreneurs, researchers, and investors, describing her first experiments in 2022 as an energy engineering student at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT).

Today, her eight-person team processes around 30 tonnes of waste each month and monitors the carbon emissions avoided.

The enterprise now generates at least USD 1,000 in monthly revenue, a modest but steady profit by Kenyan standards.

Inside the calm Knowledge Hub, on a panel organized by the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (icipe), Wambui tells her story to a dozen listeners in an intimate, almost subdued setting. But just outside, at the leafy Centre International de Conference’s Abdou Diouf (CICAD) in Dakar, Senegal, the atmosphere is charged.

Presidents, cabinet ministers, development banks, and agribusiness executives pace the halls at the annual Africa Food Systems Forum (AFSF) 2025, the continent’s flagship platform for agricultural policy and investment.

This year, the forum positioned youth at the center of Africa’s food security agenda.

Wambui is part of a new generation of innovative agripreneurs that governments and financiers promise to support.

For the first time, youth agripreneurs joined heads of state on the Forum’s opening stage, a symbolic gesture of recognition in a region where nearly 400 million people are under 35.

“Our median age is just 19. And by 2050, one in three young people in the world will be African,” said Claver Gatete, Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA).

He said that if given land, finance, technology and markets, the youths can feed not only Africa but also the world.

However, turning such vision into reality is where the continent struggles.

The African Development Bank (AfDB) often says that Africa holds roughly 60 percent of the world’s uncultivated arable land, yet poor infrastructure, limited financing, and climate shocks keep much of it idle.

With the continent collectively importing approximately USD50 billion worth of food annually, according to the African Export–Import Bank (Afreximbank), the stakes are high.

At the national level, countries like Kenya continue to face hunger crises at emergency levels.

At the start of the year, the World Food Programme estimated that around two million people were experiencing acute hunger—a recurring crisis in a country with relatively better infrastructure and higher investment flows than many of its East African neighbors.

Experts say that despite localized crises, structural issues in African agriculture worsen food insecurity across the continent.

“We have relied on grants and aid to keep agriculture afloat, and this has made the agriculture sector stuck in a risk perception trap,” said Adesuwa Ifedi, Vice President of Africa Programs at Heifer International.

Ifedi said that commercial banks and investors avoid the sector, leaving grants to fill the gap. But grant dependence can undermine ventures in the eyes of private financiers.

“Grants should leverage commercial capital so the ecosystem can thrive,” Ifedi said.

This year’s Forum coincided with the recent African Union’s rollout of its Kampala Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) Strategy & Action Plan (2026–2035), or CAADP 3.0.

The new 10-year plan aims to mobilize USD 100 billion in investment, raise farm output by 45 percent, cut post-harvest losses in half, triple intra-African agrifood trade by 2035, and place youth inclusion at the core of Africa’s food future under the AU’s Agenda 2063.

In Dakar, over 30 agriculture ministers gathered under the chairmanship of former Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn Boshem, pledging to move beyond policy drafting toward delivering tangible results for agribusiness investment.

Their top priority, they said, was to shrink Africa’s food import bill by strengthening regional value chains.

Dr. Janet Edeme, head of the Rural Economy Division at the African Union Commission, told IPS that the Forum provides mechanisms to operationalize CAADP 3.0, aiming to empower at least 30 percent of youth in the agri-food sector while closing a USD 65–70 billion annual financing gap for agricultural small and medium-sized enterprises (agri-SMEs).

She said AFSF offers a rare opportunity for youthful agripreneurs to showcase bankable projects, access mentorship, and meet investors who would otherwise be out of reach.

“There are dedicated spaces—deal rooms, youth innovation competitions, investment roundtables—where these innovators can connect with governments, development finance institutions, and private investors,” said Edeme.

Organizers pointed to new spaces for youth to meet investors, but agripreneurs like Wambui said those opportunities felt distant.

She had never heard of the AU’s new flagship plan.

“I’m only hearing about that from you. If it’s meant to guide Africa’s food future, why aren’t there clear materials or programs I can see and use?” Wambui said. “Otherwise, we leave without knowing what strategies exist to support our work.”

By day two of the six-day forum, she had found her way into the deal room, the flagship space to connect entrepreneurs with investors, but instead of streamlined matchmaking, she found confusion.

“We are looking for the investors, and they’re looking for us—yet we don’t meet. Deals still depend on connections. That’s why I came to Dakar.”

Wambui, who co-founded Harcourt Agri-Eco Farm with two other partners, said the business has grown enough to cover wages, taxes, and debt repayments. Banks now extend her loans.

But that access to financing remains an exception in a system stacked against most, said Dr. Eklou Attiogbevi-Somado, the African Development Bank’s Regional Manager for Agriculture and Agro-Industry in West Africa.

He said that AfDB data shows commercial banks in Africa channel just 3–4 percent of their lending into agriculture.

Dr. David Amudavi, CEO of Biovision Africa Trust, said this capital drought is a huge concern in a sector that drives most livelihoods on the continent.

Amudavi, whose non-profit organization promotes ecological agriculture, said that the squeeze leaves farmers, and especially young agripreneurs, struggling to access credit for starting or scaling their agribusinesses, even though nearly 60 percent of Africa’s unemployed are under 25.

“Without finance, many youth-led ventures stay stuck at micro-scale or collapse,” Amudavi said.

Not far from the Youth Dome, at the deal room, Tanzanian agripreneur Nelson Joseph Kisanga, the co-founder of Get Aroma Spices, is also navigating the same maze.

Seven years ago, he left a banking career to try poultry farming, losing almost everything in his first three years.

Kisanga regrouped, merged his venture with that of his wife, Deborah, also a young agripreneur, and built Get Aroma Spices, now working with more than 50,000 farmers across southern Tanzania.

“Agriculture back home is seen as not for young people,” he said. “Even now, scaling means loans at high interest rates. There’s no other way.”

The family-run company exports turmeric, ginger, cardamom, and avocado oil while operating a youth- and women-led agro-processing hub through a public-private partnership.

His presence at the AFSF forum has already borne fruit.

“My intention coming here was to break into the West African market, and I’m happy to say I have clinched a supply deal in Ghana. All that’s left is for the lawyers to finalize the contract.” Kisanga said, before moving to the Youth Dome, a separate pavilion for young participants.

Inside, some groups chatted, others played basketball and table tennis, while others listened as young agri-food innovators pitched their ideas to a panel of investors.

Despite the fanfare, the forum ended without revealing how much capital reached youth-led ventures.

The most visible funding for youth at the summit came via the GoGettaz Agripreneur Prize, a pan-African initiative under the Generation Africa movement. The prize awarded USD 50,000 each to Egypt’s Naglaa Mohammad, who turns agricultural waste into natural products, and Uganda’s Samuel Muyita, who uses nanotechnology to reduce post-harvest fruit and vegetable losses.

An additional USD 60,000 impact award brought total prizes to roughly USD 160,000.

Other announcements included a USD 6.7 million trade programme from the United Kingdom (UK), the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), and the African Union (AU).

Senegal also launched a USD 22.5 million pilot for Community Agricultural Cooperatives, with financing linked to the African Food Systems Resilience Fund.

Yet there was no breakdown showing how much, if any, flowed to youth-led ventures.

The opacity mirrors past patterns.

Public summaries from the 2023 deal room reported only USD 3.5 million in closed investments, with no traceable flows to youth-led enterprises.

With AFSF positioned as Africa’s premier delivery platform, observers measured the announcements against CAADP 3.0’s USD 100 billion mobilization target, saying the gap is stark.

“We have seen this pattern before: big pledges at the summit, but little clarity or follow-up on how much actually reaches youth and smallholder farmers—the backbone of African food production,” said Famara Diédhiou, a Senegal-based food systems program manager with a regional civil society network.

“Without such accountability and inclusion of all stakeholders, these forums risk becoming mere showcases rather than platforms that deliver,” he said.

For now, even with the youth-first theme, AFSF still leaves young founders stuck in the same cycle of chasing visibility, hustling for contacts, and stitching together their own contracts.

As Wambui found, Kisanga, who has attended three previous Forums, said that in AFSF access is everything: you need to know in advance who to meet and be in the right room at the right moment.

“All visibility is currency,” said Kisanga. “That’s how you survive.”

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Leonida Odongo, an activist from Kenya’s Haki Nawiri Africa, and Global Development and Environment Institute fellow Dr Timothy Wise agree that Africa’s food systems revolution should not be based on costly imports. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

By Aimable Twahirwa
Kigali, Sep 12 2022 (IPS)

The 2022 Africa Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) Summit ended in Kigali, Rwanda, with policymakers, activists, researchers, business leaders, and agricultural experts divided over the right pace to build resilient agri-food systems on the continent.

While some believe that mobilizing private and public investments, innovations, and country-based solutions is still crucial to moving forward the transformation of Africa’s food systems, others observe that the agricultural revolution on the continent needs to start from the bottom up, from the inside out, starting with small-scale farmers.

“The Green Revolution is an imported, top-down approach reliant on imported fertilizers and other inputs,” Dr Timothy Wise, a Senior Research Fellow at the Global Development and Environment Institute of the US-based Tufts University, told IPS.

Wise adds that the bias in public policies toward the private sector works against small-scale farmers, even though they, too, are technically part of the private sector.

“Markets [in Africa] can benefit farmers, and farmers need fair markets, but they cannot be dominated by large corporations and middlemen,” he says.

Latest estimates by the African Development Bank (AfDB) show that for the green revolution to happen in Africa, there is an urgent necessity to increase productivity and to move up the value chain into processed foods. Africa cannot feed itself while getting only a quarter of its potential yields and without processing what it grows, the bank says.

Africa’s green revolution’s main purpose is to transform African agriculture from a subsistence model to strong businesses that improve the livelihoods of millions of small-scale farmers across the continent.

The ambitious plan, according to officials, aims especially at advancing the commitments made at the Malabo Heads of State Summit and working hard to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals with a focus on improving the income and productivity of farmers with concrete actions that can build sustainable and resilient food systems to feed nearly 256 million reportedly suffering from severe food insecurity on the African continent.

While the Malabo declaration, to be attained by 2025, stresses concerns over Africa’s growing dependence on foreign markets for food security, arguably due to changes in consumption patterns, some experts believe that African Governments need to promote territorial markets that provide a level playing field to small-scale agroecological producers and entrepreneurs.

The Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP), one of the continental frameworks under Agenda 2063 of the African Union to help countries eliminate hunger and reduce poverty by raising economic growth through agriculture-led development, but activists say there remains much unexploited intra-African trade in agricultural commodities.

According to the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), an organization that brings together small-scale farmers from across Africa advocating for food sovereignty, seed and trade issues are highly politicized and complicated on the continent with a lot of baggage to unpack.

Africa is on the verge of losing its diverse crop varieties due to restrictive and draconian laws that prohibit the centuries-old free exchange of seeds between farmers, it said.

With the importation of seeds in the name of high-yielding and climate-smart varieties becoming common policy for most countries; activists point out that their performance is intricately and heavily dependent on the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides.

In a brief interview with IPS, activists from AFSA said the adoption of these solutions in most African countries has proved ineffective because they end up creating dependency among farmers, forcing them to lose their own farmer varieties, and forcing them only to plant monocultures, all of which contribute to food insecurity.

The most pronounced opposition came from Leonida Odongo, an activist from Kenya Haki Nawiri Africa, who observed that thousands of hectares of land in Africa are owned or leased to plantations that grow what is not eaten on the continent.

The major challenge, according to Odongo, is that most of the western companies producing seeds and agrochemicals come to convince African farmers to buy seeds and chemicals, and, in some cases, they get these as loans in form of these imported agricultural inputs.

“If Green Revolution is working for Africa, why are the rates of hunger soaring, and if climate-smart technologies are working, why does Africa continue to be ravaged by droughts?” she asked.

Both Odongo and Tim are convinced that the kind of intensification Africa’s small-scale farmers need is ecological, not based on the adoption of costly inputs.

This is because subsidizing purchases of expensive inputs, which are two to three times more expensive, and which are derived from fossil fuels, as is the current case in most African countries, is bound to fail.

While reacting to the current efforts to achieve food security in Africa, Hailemariam Desalegn, the former Prime Minister of Ethiopia and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) chair, noted that while some African countries have shown commitment to support food systems transformation, collective action would be needed to accelerate progress and real change.

“African governments should lead these efforts by prioritizing and integrating policies […] that call for healthy and nutritious diets, decent income for the farmers, and that address climate fragility,” Desalegn told delegates at the AGRF summit.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame agreed; he noted that Africa should not be struggling with food insecurity, given “our” natural endowments.

“By transforming food systems [in Africa], we can feed ourselves, and even feed others,” Kagame said.

With current preferential trade liberalization through the Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCTA), some members of the business community observed that there were still challenges to linking food-deficit areas with food-surplus areas across the continent.

Latest estimates by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) indicate that Africa is a net food-importing region of commodities such as cereals, meat, dairy products, fats, oils, and sugar, importing about USD 80 billion worth of agricultural and food products annually.

Gilbert Musonda, an agribusiness manager from Zambia who processes oil from sunflower, told IPS that in his experience, smallholder farmers are the first ones to be part of the solution, but also governments should support the private sector and ensure there are dynamic regional markets established.

African Heads of State and governments are committed in 2014 to triple intra-African trade in agricultural commodities and services by the year 2025. Recent evidence by the World Bank suggests that the export of agro-processed and other value-added goods made in Africa is greater in regional markets than in external markets outside Africa

“There is still an urgent need to invest in agribusiness in order to sustainable Africa’s food systems,” Musonda told IPS.

With a new five-year strategy adopted on the sidelines summit in Kigali to build Africa’s food system, activists say there is little attention to farmers’ needs.

“The anecdotal evidence from farmers in Africa shows that the promises of high yields distribution are not working,” says Odongo.
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A wind energy generation plant located in Loiyangalani in northwestern Kenya. The plant is set to be the biggest in Africa, generating 300 MW. This renewable energy project was supported by the African Development Bank. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Nalisha Adams
BONN, Germany, Jan 13 2021 (IPS)

2021 is going to be critical, not only for curbing the rapidly spreading COVID-19 pandemic, but also for meeting the climate challenge.

But as Dr Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA) was clear to point out, the climate challenge is essentially an energy challenge. And as large polluters continue to commit to targets of net zero emissions by 2050, the world could — in theory — potentially address the climate challenge.

“The energy that powers our daily lives our economies also alone produces about 80 percent of global emissions,” Birol noted while addressing the virtual COP26 Virtual Roundtable on Clean Power Transition earlier this week on Jan. 11.

And as the UN plans to focus on building a global coalition for carbon neutrality by the middle of this current century, there will be increased focus and a push towards providing clean, renewable energy to all by 2030.

Clean and renewable energy was the focus of discussion of this weeks COP26 Virtual Roundtable on Clean Power Transition.

Birol said the good news was that China, the European Union, UK and Japan have ambitious 2050 net zero emission targets. He said he was positive that once he took office, United States President Elect Joe Biden would make similar commitments and other major developing nations may join. The joint global emissions by the current countries committed to the net zero emission targets amount to 60 percent of the world’s emissions.

“The issue is how to transform these ambitions into real energy action,” Birol said. He said in light of this the IEA was going to introduce the world’s first roadmap to net zero emissions by 2030, scheduled to be released on May 18 so that it can be used for input for COP26.

The roadmap will outline how the world needs to transform the energy sector, how much investment is needed and what needs to be done to reach the target and “provide a concrete plan for all of us”.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, also addressed theCOP26 Virtual Roundtable on Clean Power Transition, saying that to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, an urgent transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy was needed but also that developing countries needed to supported with this shift.

Noting the figures of some 789 million people across the globe without access to electricity — the majority of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa, Guterres said that while all nations need to be able to provide electricity to all, this energy needed to be “clean and renewable so it does not contribute to the dangerous heating of our planet”.

According to the IEA, while the number of people without access to electricity has decreased over past years — with some two-thirds of the world’s progress occurring in India “where the government announced that more than 99 percent of the population had access to electricity in 2019, thanks to the ambitious Saubhagya Scheme launched in October 2017” — reaching a low in 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has reversed past gains particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.

“Sub-Saharan Africa, home to three-quarters of the global population without access to electricity, has been particularly hard hit, and recent progress achieved in the region is being reversed by the effects of the pandemic: our first estimates indicate that the population without access to electricity could increase in 2020 for the first time since 2013,” IEA states in its SDG7 Data and Projections report.

Damilola Ogunbiyi, CEO of Sustainable Energy for All, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Sustainable Energy for All, co-chair of UN-Energy, and co-chair of the COP Campaigns Energy Transition, said it would be impossible to achieve zero emissions without delivering sustainable energy to all.

“We have to make something clear. The energy transition story is also the energy access story, especially in Africa. We must recognise that we cannot achieve net zero emissions by 2050 without delivering sustainable energy for all by 2030,” she said.

Ogunbiyi, who was the first female Managing Director of the Nigerian Rural Electrification Agency, went on to say that 2021 was a pivotal year for Sustainable Development Goal 7 which focuses on access to affordable and clean energy for all.

She said with less than 10 years to go on the SDGs, the world must “now turn towards supporting bold and ambitious plans that will deliver impact at scale to help achieve SDG 7 by 2030”.

Dr Akinumi Adesina, president of the African Development Bank (AfDB), which is also a member of the COP26 energy transition council, outlined what the bank was doing in support of energy transition across the African continent.

Adesina acknowledge that Africa had the lowest levels of access to energy in the world with 570 million people without electricity.

“The challenge for Africa is simple. Africa has so little electricity. This presents a real opportunity to build reliable, affordable and sustainable energy systems for Africa,” Adesina said. He said this is one of the reasons why the bank had launched the Light Up and Power Africa project as one of its High 5 priorities for transforming the continent. Since 2015 the bank has provided electricity for 16 million people by focusing mainly on renewable energy, Adesina said.

Indeed, his comments comes as just last week the AfDB announced it would roll out a second giant electricity-generation project this time in the the Sahel. The first, largest solar power project in the world is funded by the bank and based in Morocco.

The bank stated that the Desert-to-Power project — which covers 11 countries from Senegal in the west to Djibouti in the east, and includes the Sahel countries of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger — when completed, “will turn the Sahel into one of the largest solar-power-generating areas in the world”. The AfDB went on to state that the $20-billion programme “aims to produce 10 gigawatts of electricity by 2025, providing 250 million people with power, of whom at least 90 million will be connected to the electricity grid for the first time”.

“The bank has been at the forefront of transformative renewable energy projects in Africa, including large-scale concentrated solar power projects, in Morocco…which are the largest in the world, the wind to power project which is the largest in sub-Saharan Africa,” he said, adding that the AfDB would no longer support coal projects.

“Unlocking that renewable energy future will ensure that we have a clean Africa, however, there are some challenges,” he said, explaining that this included the intermittency of solar and wind, the need for baseload power for grid stability, and the prohibitive costs of energy storage with policy and regulatory environments for renewable energy.

Adesina said the bank expected to invest $10 billion over the next five years in the energy sector.

Meanwhile Ogunbiyi  highlighted the importance of commitments as well as their financing and technical support for successful transition to renewable energy.

“Both the COP26 campaign and the UN high-level dialogue on energy need to be mutually reinforcing, just as energy access and energy transition are support another,” Ogunbiyi said. She said that the UN energy compact — an outcome of the UN high-level dialogue on energy — would be where countries can pledge their new ambitious commitments on sustainable energy in writing.

As member states, organisations, countries and cities sign up to the UN energy compacts, Ogunbiyi said it was critical that the international community rally around these commitments and support them with financing and technical assistance.

Meanwhile, Birol said critical to achieving net zero emissions was bringing the world’s countries together and providing momentum within an international context.

COP26 will be hosted by the United Kingdom and held in Glasgow, Scotland Nov. 1 to 12 and could provide the impetus for this momentum.

The UK announced the Climate Compatible Growth (CCG) programme — a £38 million fund that will focus on supporting developing nations transition to green energy.

Dr Amani Abou-Zeid, Commissioner for Energy and Infrastructure at the African Union said the that 900 million people in Africa depended on charcoal and firewood for cooking.

“This is not only an economic problem but mainly a moral issue and cause,” Abou-Zeid said.

Indeed the access to energy is also about human rights.

Last September, Ogunbiyi led a panel at the UN Global Compact’s Uniting Business Live event, where Chebet Lesan, founder of renewable energy startup BrightGreen discussed how their work in providing renewable cooking energy to vulnerable communities across Kenya and East Africa was impacting on a basic human right.

BrightGreen recycles post harvest waste, waste left on farms after harvesting, and then processes the waste into fuel that is easily adaptable by customers.

“They don’t need much change in behaviour in switching cost because the customers we are dealing with are very risk adverse and very money tight,” Lesan explained.

She said in response to a question on how to accelerate energy services to Africa, she said a key indicator was how good energy access services improved the lives of people in Africa.

“We are beginning to understand that as much as we are in the cooking energy space, our work is directly impacting the most basic human rights, even outside energy,” Lesan had said.

Diogo Vaz, a company in the idyllic island of Sao Tome and Principe in West Africa, is producing organic luxury chocolate from rare cocoa varieties. Courtesy: Diogo Vaz

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Feb 14 2020 (IPS)

A premium chocolate maker in São Tomé and Príncipe is on a drive to promote the taste for “made in Africa” chocolate, and tap into a $100 billion global indulgence associated with Valentine’s Day.

Diogo Vaz, a company in the idyllic island of São Tomé and Príncipe in West Africa, is producing organic luxury chocolate from rare cocoa varieties. The objective is to promote Africa’s palate for chocolate, a world-loved treat estimated to be enjoyed by one billion people every day.

“For centuries Africa has produced cocoa from wild beans but the consumption of chocolate is really low in Africa,” Willy Mboukem, Plantation Director at  Diogo Vaz, told IPS in a telephone interview.

“Modern consumer habits are a challenge and we know in Africa we are not big consumers of chocolate. People do not have this habit and often buy expensive products with a lot of sugar and missing out of the real taste of chocolate with a higher percentage of cocoa.”

Ivorian chocolate. The Ivory Coast is one of the world’s greatest producers of cocoa. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Ghana and Nigeria produce 70 percent of global cocoa but enjoy just five percent of the global value from this market. Cocoa producers are unable to get more value from selling the raw material for chocolate to realise higher prices for farmers.

Worse still, many African cocoa producers have battled with adding value to their beans, — a process that would boost jobs and incomes — because they have little control on their value chains.

Emerging markets consultant Edward George says in an online paper that West Africa is the largest cocoa producer in the world but it exports 75 percent of it as raw beans – a key ingredient in chocolate — giving the lion’s share of value addition to confectioners and retailers at the end of the value chain.

George said that despite Africa’s agricultural sector having many inbuilt advantages of abundant agricultural land, a rapidly-growing population and lower labour costs, it lacked an efficient marketing infrastructure.

This prevented farmers and processors from getting full value from their crop, even in its raw form. In addition, Africa’s agriculture value chains were highly fragmented and face international competition.

George said a solution to poor value addition in Africa was to boost local demand for cash crops, within countries and regionally.

Last November, the African Development Bank (AfDB), Credit Suisse AG, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Limited and the Ghana Cocoa Board signed a $600-million loan to boost cocoa production in Ghana, the second-largest cocoa producer in the world.

The deal will be extended to other cocoa-producing countries in Africa, according to AfDB President Akinumwi Adesina. Adesina has long bemoaned the fact that Africa is not dominating the cocoa value chain, despite being the leading producer.

Ivorian cocoa framer Abou Ouattara in this file photo dated 2016. Credit: Busani Bafana/ IPS

“African farmers sweat, while others eat sweets. While the price of cocoa has hit an all-time low, profits of global manufacturers of chocolate have hit an all-time high…. It is time for Africa to move to the top of the global food value chain, through agro-industrialisation and adding value to all of what it produces,” Adesina said at the Bank’s Annual Meetings last year.

The AfDB is a strong supporter of agriculture value chains on the continent. The AfDB’s Feed Africa Strategy (2016-2025) marked a shift by the bank towards approaching agriculture on the continent as a business. Agriculture is currently one of the top priorities for AfDB.

“Agriculture is the most important profession and business in the world,” Adesina said last month when he was conferred with an honorary Doctorate of Science by the Federal University of Agriculture in Abeokuta, Nigeria.

Chocolate visions

Diogo Vaz has bucked the trend and is adding value to cocoa beans at source, a risk Mboukem says is paying off thanks to growing demand for high end chocolate in Europe and the United States.

The company operates a 420 hectare farm bought in 2013 which has been replanted with 150,000 cocoa trees, which include the unique Amelonado and Trinitario varieties endemic to São Tomé and Príncipe. The Portuguese introduced cocoa from Brazil to the island nation over 160 years ago.

Mboukem said Diogo Vaz was riding on the rich cocoa-growing history in São Tomé and Príncipe and is establishing itself as a global brand for chocolate. It currently exports bulk and tablet chocolate to France, Portugal and the Gambia. The company, which employs 250 people, exports 12 tonnes of fine chocolate every two months.

“We have looked at what the European and U.S. market needs which is  low fat, low sugar organic chocolate with traceability,” said Mboukem.  “We have maintained producing chocolate from different varieties of cocoa from the farm to factory. This project is an important page in the history of Africa to master the cocoa value chain.”

It is, however, a luxury market item. “You sell units at high price and then you have a lot of different costs like the cost of packing is a big cost for us and then operational costs but chocolates, in general, is a profitable business and is huge all over the world especially in Europe, U.S., and Japan,” he said.

Diogo Vaz holds public tastings and open factory tours to educate the community in São Tomé and Príncipe about chocolate making but importantly to understand the company’s philosophy of making good chocolate through investing in the community.

“People say it is an African chocolate but the packaging and the way it’s presented and the story behind makes them feel proud because it is 100 percent African with international characteristics. They say
the chocolate is good and we have been making good chocolate, we’ve got a professional chocolatier.”

Climate change eating chocolate?

Weather extremes, a result of climate change, will lead to a fall in cocoa production by 2030, a 2011 study by the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) predicted.

Climate change, and the resultant change in the rainy seasons, Mboukem said, has forced Diogo Vaz to change production methods in terms planting the beans and the fermentation and grading process to retain the best quality.

Rising incomes are driving the demand for cocoa beans, which is expected to reach 4.5 million tonnes by 2020, up from 3.5 million tonnes in 2016.

Cocoa farming by over five million small holder farmers around the world, a bulk of them in Africa, supports more than 50 million people globally, according to the World Cocoa Foundation.

The International Cocoa Organisation (ICCO) says while the organic cocoa market is less than 0.5 percent of the total global production, there is growing demand for organic cocoa products as consumers worry about food safely and the environmental footprint of food production.

The global chocolate market is projected to grow to $161 billion by 2024 from $103.2 billion in 2017.

“The future is to expand value addition of cocoa beans in Africa and transform the livelihoods of many people who depend on cocoa and ensure Africa enjoys real chocolate,” Mboukem said.

Excerpt:

IITA Director General Nteranya Sanginga told IPS that Africa should build capacity to research and innovative its food systems to beat hunger and poverty. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Feb 11 2020 (IPS)

Africa needs to invest in agriculture by putting more resources into innovative research and development that can boost food and nutritional security, according to leading scientist, Nteranya Sanginga.

Sanginga, Director-General of the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA), based in Ibadan, Nigeria, says Africa comes short on leveraging its huge resources when it comes to transforming agriculture for economic growth.  

“Investment in research in Africa is poor, less than one percent and when it comes to agriculture, it is worse because the leaders do not understand the importance of research,” Sanginga told IPS.

“Today if you kill IITA in Africa then you have killed agriculture research in Africa.”

Sanginga, a national of the Democratic Republic of Congo, has specialised in agronomy and soil microbiology. He has been involved in agricultural research and development, particularly in applied microbial ecology, plant nutrition and integrated natural resources management in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia.

Africa, Sanginga says, should build capacity for research in order to innovative its food systems to beat hunger and poverty.

Young people hold the key to the continent’s food future, says Sanginga who launched a Youth agriprenuers programme at IITA to help young African create profitable agribusinesses.

Farmers weeding a wheat field outside Accra, Ghana. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

Speaking at a meeting of the African Leaders for Nutrition in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia last week, African Development Bank (AfDB) President Akinwumi Adesina said Africa should invest in skills development for the youth so the continent’s entrepreneurs can leverage emerging technologies to transform Africa’s food system to generate new jobs.

• Africa’s population is projected to double to 2.5 billion people in 40 years putting pressure on governments to deliver more food and jobs in addition to better livelihoods.
• The good news is that Africa’s economic growth is rising and expected to register 3.9 percent in 2020 and 4.1 percent in 2021, according to the AfDB’s 2020 African Economic outlook report.
• According to the World Bank, African agriculture and agribusiness could be worth $1 trillion in the next ten years. But Africa must overcome several barriers to agricultural development from poor infrastructure, limited credit access for farmers and low use of improved inputs and mechanisation.

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) has estimated that Africa needs to invest up to $400 billion in agriculture over the next ten years to meet its food needs.

To date, 44 African countries have signed the Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) Compact to spend 10 percent of their budgets on agriculture and increase their productivity by at least 6 percent. This follows the Maputo Declaration on Agriculture and Food Security made by African Heads of State in 2003.

Under Sanginga’s leadership, the IITA won the 2018 Africa Food Prize for its cutting-edge agricultural research and innovations that have boosted nutrition and incomes. Since its founding 50 years ago, IITA has developed new, improved and high-yielding varieties of cassava, cowpea, maize, banana, soybean and yam. Overall, for Africans, the value of the crops developed by IITA and its partners now stands at over $17 billion, underscoring its contribution to Africa’s agriculture and economy.

Excerpts of the interview follow:

Inter Press Service (IPS): How is IITA leveraging its successful research to push for greater investment in agriculture research?

Nteranya Sanginga (NS): Our legacy is starting a programme to change the mindset of the youth in agriculture. Unfortunately [with] our governments that is where you have to go and change mindsets completely. Most probably 90 percent of our leaders consider agriculture as a social activity basically for them its [seen as a] pain, penury. They proclaim that agriculture is a priority in resolving our problems but we are not investing in it. We need that mindset completely changed.

Akinwumi Adesina, a colleague we worked together with at IITA, and I had a discussion that one day we would change the way agriculture has gone. This happened when I became DG and when he became Minister of Agriculture in Nigeria. We managed to change the way agriculture was perceived in Nigeria but he never succeeded in getting the government to invest more that 3 percent in agriculture in Nigeria. So agriculture is to be considered an investment and two countries in Africa have made that happen: Ethiopia – which is investing about 20 percent of its budget in agriculture – and Rwanda. 

We must invest in agriculture in the same way we invest in mining. For example, Nigeria imports $5 billion worth of food per year, buying food from outside such as rice from Thailand and wheat from the U.S. You know the significance of this is that we are exporting jobs instead of creating jobs here, we are creating jobs in Thailand for rice [producers/farmers] and the U.S. for wheat [producers/farmers]. We have proven that we can produce rice and wheat. Again and again that mind-set of the leaders who basically do not understand that all the other continents developed through agriculture. We have to make the case for agriculture.

IPS: IITA has places a strong emphasis on approaching agriculture as a business. What are the policies needed that will create an opening for this?

NS: I think we are not going to create a miracle in Africa. We have to follow what other people have done. Adesina started smart subsidies in Nigeria and instead of giving money like you would do in the U.S. or Europe, he started buying equipment and fertilisers and other inputs for the farmers, that is working.

I do not see another way of helping agriculture in Africa if we do not facilitate and subsidise. Mind you, in the U.S. or Europe if you stop subsidies all those farmers will leave agriculture so you need to ensure that you find some way of helping our farmers invest in agriculture. It is leadership and policies that are needed.  Why would we allow someone to steal $10 billion from a country and not make an effort to invest this in something useful?

Besides, most banks in Africa consider agriculture risky but some have started initiatives to help farmers. In Kenya, Equity Bank has understood that agriculture is a business. In Nigeria, there has been a programme to put some money and de-risk lending for agriculture. In fact Equity Bank in Kenya lent to farmers and who had less than one percent default in their repayment rate. So really agriculture is a good business but still banks are reluctant.

Excerpt:

Youth at the Grand Médine town hall in Dakar, Senegal. Senegal has a large youth population, half of which is under the age of 18. By 2025, 376,000 youth are expected to enter the job market that offers only 30,000 jobs. And this number will rise to 411,000 in 2030, according to the Wilson Centre. Credit: Samuelle Paul Banga/IPS

By Mantoe Phakathi
MBABANE, Feb 4 2020 (IPS)

Africa’s inability to produce adequate skills is negatively impacting its economic growth.

In fact, the continent is not getting a good return even on the minimal investment it is making in education, says Thembinkosi Dlamini, an economist and senior extractives lead at Oxfam South Africa.

He was responding to one of the main findings in the African Development Bank’s (AfDB) 2020 Africa Outlook Report, released last week. Titled Developing Africa’s Workforce for the Future, the report  notes that most African countries at all levels of income exhibit lower educational attainment, both in quantity and quality.

Thembinkosi Dlamini told IPS that education in Africa remains untransformed to meet the skills of the future. He attributed this to lack of foresight and dwindling public investments in education.

The report notes that many African countries’ student expenditure is the lowest in the world, at $533 for primary and $925 for high school. This is despite the fact that African countries allocated an average of 5 percent of GDP and 16 percent of government budget to education – just above the United Nations recommended lower limit of 4 and 15 percent, respectively from 2010-17.

As a result, Africa’s growth has not been inclusive because of the lack of jobs in high-productivity sectors such as manufacturing. Moreover, large swaths of the population are stuck in low-productivity, low-paying jobs in traditional agriculture and informal sectors.

“The slow pace of structural transformation stems from shortcomings in human capital reflecting low skills and education levels,” reads the report. 

Only about a third of African countries have achieved inclusive growth. The report observes that countries with better education outcomes and higher rates of structural change are more likely to achieve inclusive growth.

“Countries with active inequality-reducing policies have better prospects of reducing extreme poverty more by 2030,” states the report.

The report also points out that there is a lack of complementarity between physical and human capital in African countries resulting in a limited contribution of education to increasing labour productivity growth at the macro level.

“Public investments in both education and infrastructure can yield greater benefits in promoting long-term growth than investing only in education or only in infrastructure because both types of investment strongly complement each other,” reads the report.

Speaking at the launch of the report in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, AfDB president, Dr Akinwumi Adesina, said physical infrastructure, while important, is not enough to drive much needed greater growth and productivity of African economies.

“African countries should accelerate investments as well as the development of human capital,” said Adesina.

Unemployable with a master’s in engineering

The lack of investments or available job market is a case in point for Mkhonzeni Dlamini’s [no relation to Thembinkosi Dlamini]. 

Mkhonzeni Dlamini (32) graduated with a BA in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Eswatini six years ago. He thought getting a job would be easy because Eswatini’s government had classified his qualification as one of the priority courses owing to the shortage of engineers in the country. However, Mkhonzeni Dlamini failed to get a job the following year. He then decided to pursue a Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering in Taiwan, hoping that this would improve his chances. He graduated in 2018 and returned home.

“Even now, I’m unemployed,” he told IPS, adding: “I don’t understand why a person with my skill is failing to get a job considering that the country needs engineers to develop.”

The visibly frustrated Mkhonzeni Dlamini blamed this situation to the “government’s poor planning”, saying that there are many other young graduates, including doctors, who are idling at home because there are no jobs.

“The government doesn’t seem to have a training plan to match available jobs. In fact, the government doesn’t seem to know how many students are on training and plan to create jobs for those graduates,” said Mkhonzeni Dlamini.

Having searched for a job since his return in 2018, he is now considering leaving the continent.

“Like many African graduates who are frustrated like me, we’re now thinking of going back to the countries that colonised us,” he said. Mkhonzeni Dlamini is exploring possibilities of getting a job in the United Kingdom.

Educating Africa’s youth for jobs of the future

Meanwhile, Adesina said youth unemployment must be given top priority. With 12 million graduates entering the labour market each year and only three million of them getting jobs, the mountain of youth unemployment is rising annually.

He said given the fast pace of changes, driven by the 4^th industrial revolution – from artificial intelligence to robotics, machine learning, quantum computing – Africa must invest more in re-directing and re-skilling its labour force and, especially the youth, to effectively participate.

“The youth must be prepared for the jobs of the future – not the jobs of the past,” said Adesina.

Thembinkosi Dlamini agreed.

“We haven’t seen academic papers recently testing the relevance of the education to current and future needs of the economy,”Thembinkosi Dlamini told IPS, adding: “The report correctly points out the high skills mismatch particularly amongst youth employees [saying] that Africans are miseducated.”

Leave no country, no youth behind

Despite the limitations in the workforce, the report notes some success stories on the continent.

In 2019, East Africa was the fastest-growing region, and North Africa continued to make the largest contribution to Africa’s overall GDP growth, due mainly to Egypt’s strong growth momentum. Moreover, six African countries are among the world’s 10 fastest-growing economies: Rwanda at 8.7 percent, Ethiopia 7.4 percent, Côte d’Ivoire 7.4 percent, Ghana 7.1 percent, Tanzania 6.8 percent, and Benin 6.7 percent.

Former Liberian President, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who attended the launch together with ministers and other dignitaries, described these six economies as the “stars among us”.

“We want to see more, particularly countries like mine, which have been left behind, so that more can be done to give them the support that they need,” she said.

• Economic growth in Africa is estimated at 3.4 percent for 2019, about the same as in 2018. Although stable, this growth rate is 0.6 percentage point less than the rate projected in the 2019 African Economic Outlook. It is also below the decadal average growth for the region (5 percent).
• The slower than expected growth is due partly to the modest expansion of the continent’s “big five” — Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, and South Africa — which jointly grew at an average rate of only 3.1 percent, compared with the average of 4.0 percent for the rest of the continent’s economies, notes the report.
• Africa’s GDP growth is marginally above the world average of 3.0 percent for 2019 and well above the average for advanced economies at 1.7 percent.
• It also exceeds that of emerging and developing economies outside Africa, excluding China and India. 

While the statistics matter, AfDB’s Adesina said the faces behind the figures should be prioritised.

“And every single day we work, let’s look at the real lives behind the statistics. Let’s hear their voices. Let’s feel their aspirations,” said Adesina.

Soi Cate Chelang, a self-taught palette seat designer and carpenter, hard at work. She says that even after a decade of running her business she is unable to get bank credit to expand. Her situation is not a unique one in Africa. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Miriam Gathigah
NAIROBI, Jan 22 2020 (IPS)

What stands between Soi Cate Chelang and her dream of turning her small pallet-making business into a major enterprise is capital.

In Kenya, Chelang may well be a pioneer in making seats out of wooden pallets — the flat pieces of wood used to support goods or containers during shipping.

While she has no formal training in carpentry, Chelang tells IPS that she comes from a long line of carpenters, having trained under her grandfather and uncle. And what she doesn’t know, she learns from online lessons on carpentry.

She started the business more than a decade ago — before anyone else was doing it — and her products have been popular with consumers.

“My designs stand out because I combine many different elements. It is not just about turning wood into a seat. I use colourful fabrics and female clients enjoy fabrics that brighten their homes. I also make kids furniture from pallets and use fabric that have popular cartoons on them,” she expounds. Chelang sells her three-seater household pallet sofa for 100 to 300 dollars, depending on the design and material used.

Clients seek her services through her social media pages where she markets her products under the name Soi Pallet Designs.

Not enough credit to grow

But the 35-year-old is worried that the opportunity to cash in on her unique designs is passing her by.

“I do not have the money to set up a proper workshop and showroom. I cannot apply for contracts to make pallet seats for major entertainment clubs in the city because I do not have capital to finance such big orders,” she says, explaining that such clubs are interested in her designs.

“I managed to take one order of 5,000 dollars in 2018 because one of my mentors provided me with the capital to finance the order,” she says.

But that was a once-off. Because without collateral, she says, the banks will grant her a business loan. So for now she has to make seats to order. Even in this instance her clients must first pay 30 to 50 percent of the total cost to enable her to purchase materials and pay for some of her labour costs.

“I work with three carpenters who I pay on a daily basis. We only take one order at a time because I do not have a proper workshop and I cannot afford to hire more carpenters,” Chelang expounds.

The circumstances have served to confine her business to her home in Kisumu City some 350 kilometres away from Kenya’s capital Nairobi.

Traditional credit not available for African women 

But Chelang’s inability to expand her business is not a new story. According to the MasterCard Index of Women Entrepreneurs 2017, a lack of capital is one of the major challenges facing women doing business in Africa today, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.  

This is despite data by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) report of 2017-18 showing that sub-Saharan Africa has taken the lead as the only region where women form the majority of self-employed individuals. 

• According to the report, globally, Africa has the most positive attitudes towards entrepreneurship as 76 percent of working age adults consider entrepreneurship a good career choice, while another 75 percent believe that entrepreneurs are admired in their societies.
• Over the last decade, the number of women joining entrepreneurship is on a steady rise, the GEM report states. Women are high-technology developers in Kenya or, like Chelang, are making waves in the informal sector.
• Female entrepreneurs are also in the steel manufacturing business in South Africa, and in the cocoa agro-processing businesses in Ivory Coast and the larger West African region.
• Even more impressive, the MasterCard Index of Women Entrepreneurs 2017 indicates that Uganda and Botswana have the highest percentage of women entrepreneurs globally. Other countries in this league include Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria and Zambia.

Women in entrepreneurship stand to gain from the African Development Bank’s affirmative action financing. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

Setting up lasting financial structures to benefit Africa’s women

Aware of the financial constraints facing women in business, the African Development Bank (AfDB) is making concerted efforts to address the widening financing gap between male and female entrepreneurs in Africa.

The pan-African bank has placed the financing gap between male and female entrepreneurs across Africa, at a whopping 42 billion dollars.

To address this gap, the African Heads of State launched the Affirmative Finance Action for Women in Africa (AFAWA) programme back in 2016. 

• As a joint pan-African initiative between AfDB and the African Guarantee Fund, AFAWA is a risk-sharing facility that will de-risk lending to women-owned and women-led businesses.
• During the most recent Global Gender Summit held in Kigali in 2019, AFAWA was officially launched in Rwanda. The affirmative action programme received a one-million-dollar commitment from the Rwandese government. Still in 2019, G7 leaders approved a package totalling 251 million dollars in support of AFAWA.
• Additionally, Attijariwafa Bank, a Moroccan multinational commercial bank, and the African Guarantee Fund have signed a 50 million dollar Memorandum of Understanding towards risk lending to women through partial guarantees.

By using a holistic approach, this affirmative action programme will address the major factors preventing women in Africa, including the access of financial products and services such as loans. Consequently these financial services will also be accessible and affordable as well.

AFAWA finance will unlock three billion dollars in credit for women in businesses and enterprises in Africa. Towards this goal, this programme will work with existing commercial banks and microfinance institutions to engineer lasting structural changes, to the benefit of women across the continent.

Further, there will be a rating system to evaluate financial institutions based on the extent to which they lend to women, and the consequent socio-economic impact. Top institutions will receive preferential terms from the pan-African bank.

Sustainable, women-owned businesses will contribute to the economy

Financial experts such as Irene Omari say the AFAWA is important for women’s financial inclusion. A banker and leading entrepreneur in the Lakeside City of Kisumu, Omari tells IPS that “banks do not take female entrepreneurs seriously. Banks are still a long way from embracing women doing business. We are still considered very high risk by financial institutions because we lack collateral”.

As the sole proprietor of Top Strategy Achievers Limited, a multi-million-shilling branding and printing company, she is all too familiar with the financial challenges facing women in business today.

“I started working at 23 years old in the hospitality industry. I would also act as a middle person between branding companies and clients. In Kisumu City this services were hard to find. I saved every coin that I made and used it as capital,” she says.

Omari registered her company in 2013. She began operations in the same year while still employed at a local bank. “My salary paid the two staff that I had in the beginning, office rent, and all other overheads until the company could stand on its feet,” she says.

She says that because women, like Chelang, are not considered bankable they are significantly constrained in setting up solid, physical infrastructures to drive the growth and sustainability of their businesses.

“This is the reason why women are in self-employment where they basically work for themselves and not in entrepreneurship where they bring as many employees on board as possible,” Omari expounds.

• In Omari’s case she is an entrepreneur, and need not be at the place of work at all times because the business can thrive and be sustainable even in their absence. In self-employment, the presence of the business owner must be felt at all times.

Francis Kibe Kiragu, a lecturer in gender and development studies at the University of Nairobi, tells IPS that while women have sufficiently demonstrated a desire to run their own enterprises, they suffer crippling financial exclusion.

“Women in self-employment or entrepreneurship are therefore driven by necessity and not innovation. They just want to meet their basic needs and as a result, they are perceived as contributing very little to the economy,” he observes.

Because of these challenges, he says that women are more likely than men to discontinue running a business. The GEM 2017 report confirms Kiragu’s assertions as it indicates that, while Africa may have the highest number of women running start-ups, the number of women running established businesses is lower.

In fact, in the sub-Saharan Africa region alone, there are two women starting a new business venture for every one woman running an established business, the report indicates.

“I started designing, making and marketing my pallet seats at 25 years old. Ten years later I am still facing the same financial challenges I faced when I started. Many times I have come close to abandoning this dream and finding employment,” says Chelang.

Through the AFAWA it is hoped that women like Chelang will soon be able to leverage financial instruments to their and their businesses’ benefit.

Young farmers and brothers Prosper and Prince Chikwara are using precision farming techniques at their horticulture farm, outside Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Experts say that unless Africa promotes new and innovative farmers, the continent will be at the mercy of other nations for its food security. Credit: Busani Bafana/ IPS

By Busani Bafana
IBADAN, Nigeria, Jan 9 2020 (IPS)

Africa will starve or survive on expensive food imports because it is not growing new farmers, research shows. And the challenge remains among researchers, policy makers, public and private sector actors to get African youth interested in agriculture on a continent where a growing number of people go to bed hungry every night.

The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), a global research institute that generates agricultural innovations to meet Africa’s most pressing challenges of hunger, malnutrition and poverty, has long been promoting several programmes to attract and keep youth in agriculture.

But it has been a tall order to convince the youth that agriculture is the key to creating food and jobs in Africa, IITA Director General Nteranya Sanginga told IPS.

“I have wanted the youth to define what agriculture is all about, for them agriculture is pain, penury and poverty,” Sanginga said. “We need to transform that mind-set and get them to understand that agriculture could be a source of wealth, business and pleasure.”

In 2012 the institution launched the IITA Youth Agripreneur, a programme that enrols 60 youth for hands on training in agriculture and entrepreneurship in 24 centres across Africa each year.

Sanginga said unless Africa promotes new and innovative farmers, the continent will be at the mercy of other regions for its food security.

• Africa has 257 million hungry people, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO).
• While Africa holds 65 percent of the world’s uncultivated, arable land and adequate water resources, the continent spends more than $35 billion annually importing food — a bill projected by the African Development Bank (AfDB) to balloon to $110 billion by 2025.
• About 237 million people in sub-Saharan Africa are suffering from chronic under nutrition, which is derailing past gains in eradicating hunger and poverty, said the FAO in a joint 2019 report, Africa Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition.
• The report underlines the need to accelerate action to achieve the U.N. Sustainable Development Goal of achieving zero hunger as well as global nutrition targets amidst challenges of youth unemployment and climate change.
• “Agriculture and the rural sector must play a key role in creating decent jobs for the 10 to 12 million youths that join the labour market each year,” the FAO said.

At the heart of the food challenge is the diminishing labour pool. Smallholder farmers keep Africa fed.  Agriculture contributes about 30 percent to the continent’s GDP but the sector is hampered by poor productivity and low investment and the average age of a smallholder farmer in Africa is 60. Yet young farmers are not being produced fast enough to close the labour gap in agriculture production.

Agriculture has a negative image of not being attractive enough for the more ambitious, tech-savvy youth who would rather hustle in urban areas than become farmers.

“When we project farming as a viable economic opportunity for young people, we should tell them it is a process and you have to get your hands dirty,” says Lawrence Afere (35), founder of Springboard, an online network of producers and rural entrepreneurs in Ondo State of Nigeria.

Springboard is working with more than 3,000 members across six states in Nigeria growing plantains, beans and rice. The network gives the farmers inputs and training and buys back the produce for processing and value addition.

It has been a tall order to convince the youth that agriculture is the key to creating food and jobs in Africa, IITA Director General Nteranya Sanginga told IPS. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

The solutions to tackling youth unemployment in Africa are varied but a key solution is to sell agriculture as a business, says Sanginga who initiated the “Start Them Early Programme(STEP)”, which promotes agribusiness studies to primary and secondary school students through club participation, course work and experimental learning.

Furthermore, the IITA has taken a research approach to getting more young people in agriculture. 

• The institute launched a fellowship programme under a three-year research grant called “Enhancing Capacity to Apply Research Evidence (CARE)”, a policy for youth engagement in agribusiness and rural economic activities in Africa.
• The action-oriented fellowship targets young academics and professionals and graduate students at the post-course work/research stage of their programmes. It is funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and has awarded 30 research fellowships in 2019.
• The fellowship provides opportunities for the youth by improving the availability and use of evidence for inclusive and “youth friendly” policies on youth engagement in agribusiness and rural economic activities. The duration of the research is six months and youth are trained on production of research evidence for policy-making.

University researcher Akilimali Ephrem is a 2019 fellow under the CARE programme. He is researching traits for successful agriprenuers in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“I identified that young people were not attracted towards agriculture. They underestimate the value of agriculture and this has to do with our culture in the DRC,” Akilimali told IPS in an interview.

“Youths are struggling to get jobs yet they are completing their studies and I saw that this CARE project was a way forward because it looks at how best we can engage the youth in agribusiness as an alternative to employment,” said Akilimali, whose research title is ‘Perceived social norms, psychological capital and youth agripreneurial intention in DRC’.

“Everyone is saying that the youth should find a life in agriculture and agribusiness but nobody has ever asked whether these youth would like to do so or have a desire to do so. Probably we should start by increasing their desire to go into agribusiness otherwise we shall be targeting the wrong people,” said Akilimali, who identified psychological capital – a positive developmental mind set – as a key ingredient for any successful agribusiness entrepreneur.

• Young people in Africa will make up 42 percent of the global youth population and account for 75 percent of people under the age of 35 on the continent, according the 2019 World Population Data Sheet published by the Population Reference Bureau, a United States-based organisation that informs on population, health and the environment.
• In the parlance of the youth, agriculture is not ‘cool’ because of its association with back breaking long hours of work in the field for little gain.
• Limited access to credit, finance, land and appropriate productivity boosting technology has combined to exclude the youth from the business of farming.

Already, Africa’s food and beverage markets are projected to reach $1 trillion by 2030, according to the AfDB.  

AfDB president, Akinumwi Adesina has said making agriculture profitable and  ‘cool’ for young people through investment is the solution to pulling millions of Africans out of poverty and a means to stem the tide of youth migration to Europe in search for a better life.

But development researcher Jim Sumberg, from the Institute of Development Studies in the United Kingdom, is not convinced agriculture is the silver bullet.

Sumberg says the idea of agriculture as a vast domain of entrepreneurial opportunity for young people is being grossly over sold, noting there are opportunities for some and for others it is a case of hard work for little reward.

“I believe the idea that a large proportion of young people are leaving rural areas and/or farming is over-played,” Sumberg, told IPS via e-mail.

“There is no real evidence. Further, why would anyone want to “lure” young people into tedious, poorly paid work? It makes no sense! It is true that a modernised agriculture will provide some job opportunities (for youth and others), but I doubt it will be the millions and millions of jobs often promised.”

Sumberg said he had little patience with the idea of changing people’s mind sets so that they see “farming as a business”. It can only be a business if there is the potential for profit, and at the moment there are many situations where the potential is not there.

Dr Mithika Mwenda of PACJA (right) and Professor Seth Osafo (left), one of the negotiators at the climate talks currently being held in Spain. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Isaiah Esipisu
MADRID, Dec 6 2019 (IPS)

African legislators have been challenged to come up with legal frameworks for climate change to enable countries avoid catastrophes and reactionary emergencies that eat up their budgets.

“African countries are spending up to 3.9 percent of their GDPs on climate emergencies, which in many cases have not been budgeted for,” said Dr. James Murombedzi, the head of the Africa Climate Policy Centre (ACPC) at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA).

During an event on the sidelines of the ongoing 25th Conference Of The Parties (COP25), the U.N. climate negotiations in Madrid, Spain, climate experts, civil society organisations and U.N. representatives observed that legislators in African countries should mainstream climate change in all their national development plans as a way of adapting to the phenomena.

This comes at a time when the East African region is experiencing unprecedented floods due to the 300 percent above average, heavy downpour that is occurring during what is supposed to be a short rainy season. Over the past two weeks, floods have killed more than 100 people in Kenya alone, displacing hundreds of households, breaking river banks, dams and even houses.

• According to meteorological scientists, this is due to the irregular oscillation or variation of Sea Surface Temperatures – a climate-related phenomenon known as Indian Ocean Dipole.
• The floods in East Africa are occurring just months after Cyclones Idai and Kenneth swept through the Southern Africa region affecting more than 2.2 million people in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi.
• In general, analysis from Save the Children show that in 2019 alone, over 1,200 people died as the result of cyclones, floods and landslides in Mozambique, Somalia, Kenya, Sudan and Malawi, leaving at least 33 million people at emergency levels of food insecurity or worse. This has had a huge financial implication on countries, humanitarian agencies and individual families running into millions of dollars.

“What are we going to tell our people?” asked Roger Nkodo Dang, the President for the Pan Africa Parliament during an event at COP25. “As African legislators, we need to play our role, and then speak with one voice to call for funding so as to develop resilience,” he said.

In Africa, climate change has caused drought, change in distribution of rainfall, the drying-up of rivers. Intense flooding causes landslides and in Kenya, residents of West Pokot County are currently grappling with with the deaths of 50 people who were last week buried alive by landslides following heavy rainfall that continues to pound the East African region. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

According to Gareth Phillips, the manager for Climate and Environmental Finance at the Africa Development Bank (AfDB), African politicians can take advantage of low-hanging fruit in terms of climate action, but only if there are sound legislative frameworks in place.

“We can start by enacting legislation that; encourages renewable energy targets and non-fossil fuel obligations, the removal of fossil fuel subsidies, while at the same time providing subsidies for renewable energy, and observes the energy efficiency standards, building standards and performance,” said Philips.

He urged them to focus on adaptation instead of mitigation, and take advantage of the Adaptation Benefits Mechanism – a new mechanism being developed by the AfDB that is designed to facilitate payments to project developers for the delivery of certified adaptation benefits.

The delegates were reviewing the role of African parliamentarians in implementing the Paris Agreement, with focus on challenges and prospects.

• Under the agreement, all parties were supposed to submit their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), which are a set of interventions prepared by countries to contribute to the reduction of Green House Gas (GHG) emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change.

However, according to preliminary findings of an ongoing study commissioned by the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA) in eight selected countries — Botswana, Ethiopia, Gabon, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania and Zambia — there is still a long way to go for African countries to implement their suggested NDCs.

“It is clear that many countries do not have legal frameworks on climate change, which should be the main vehicle for implementation of the Paris Agreement,” Dr Mithika Mwenda, the Executive Secretary at PACJA, told IPS.

Countries like Kenya, which has its National Climate Change Framework Policy in place, were seen to be progressing better than those without.

“With this policy, we have been able to mainstream climate change in all national development plans, and this makes it easy to allocate budgetary funds to specific activities directly related to climate change,” Dr Charles Mutai, the Director of Climate Change at the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources in Kenya, told IPS.

Based on national legislation, county governments have followed suit, where six of them have already enacted county-specific climate change legislations, and this has enabled them to directly allocate funds to adaptation and related activities.

However, according to the new U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) report, unless GHG emissions fall by 7.6 percent each year between 2020 and 2030, the world will miss the opportunity to get on track towards the 1.5°C temperature goal of the Paris Agreement, and this is a pointer to even more devastating climate related disasters that what is being experienced at the moment.

The Global Gender Summit, hosted by the African Development Bank (AfDB), and which is currently taking place from Nov. 25 to 27 in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali. Credit: Plasir Muzogeye/IPS

By Emmanuel Hitimana
KIGALI, Nov 26 2019 (IPS)

When Rwandan-born, Senegalese-raised entrepreneur and businesswoman Kristine Ngiriye was 18 she had a brilliant idea that she wanted to translate into a business. But when she went to her local bank for a loan they told her to rather get married, because “ a woman must be married instead of venturing into business”, Ngiriye tells IPS.

Even though this happened more than two decades ago, women in Africa are clearly oftentimes discriminated against when it comes to accessing investment and capital.

The issue was one of the main talking points at the Global Gender Summit, hosted by the African Development Bank (AfDB), and which is taking place from Nov. 25 to 27 in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali.

Attended by some 300 business women, policy makers and political leaders,  including Ethiopia’s President Sahle-Work Zewde — the only female president on the continent — attendees learnt that while African women contribute towards not only bettering their lives, but those of their families, some 70 percent where excluded financially. And in instances where women saved and offered capital for a loan, many where rejected or in the rare cases where they were given credit, it was considered “high risk”.

AfDB president Dr. Akinwumi Adesina reminded participants present at discussion panel titled, “Unpacking constraints to gender equality”, that policymakers and even bankers had to be accountable to women.

“Let’s be smart and let’s be wise: women are the best investments any society can make. When they earn, they spend 90 percent of their income on their households, including [on] their husbands,” Adesina said.

Kristine Ngiriye was 18 she had a brilliant idea that she wanted to translate into a business. But she was told by bankers to get married instead. Now the CEO of a consulting boutique that offers specialised services to governments and businesses and founder of Entreprenarium, an accelerator for African women in business she has made huge impact in business across the continent. Courtesy: Entreprenarium

Ngiriye is a case in point. Her mother had stepped in to be her guarantee and eventually her business journey led her to founding Entreprenarium in 2014.

“My business is here today, after a woman, my mother, committed to be my guarantee. With all the support I got along the journey I decided to help other women entrepreneurs to build their enterprises and help them grow,” Ngiriye told IPS.

Ngiriye’s lists of accolades are long and her impact far-reaching.

On the Entreprenarium’s Facebook page they describe themselves as “the first pan-African philanthropic accelerator that helps entrepreneurs start and sustain innovative businesses to drive Africa’s prosperity”.

Since the accelerator was founded, some 2,000 entrepreneurs have been trained across Africa — Entreprenarium has offices in Libreville, Kigali, Dakar, Abidjan and Brussels — with $2.1 million invested towards technical assistance and the funding of 52 projects.

In addition, Le Salon des Entrepreneurs de Guinée reports that Ngiriye is CEO of KN & Partners, a consulting boutique that offers specialised services to governments and businesses, which include political marketing and international business development.

But Ngiriye still believes that while businesswomen have come a long way since when she first started out, men’s perceptions about a woman’s ability to achieve their dreams have not changed at all.

“What [is currently] happening to these women is exactly what we lived through, which is lack of access to finance and technical assistance. I can say that after these past 27 years nothing has changed. Maybe they are a little bit lucky than I was to have a continent full of possibilities,” she said.

What a first day of the #2019GGS here in #Kigali. Impactful conversations with Dr. @akin_adesina, President of @AfDB_Group, and our Founder, @kristingiriye, about the state of women’s access to finance in Africa and the solutions to reduce the financing gap for women entreprises. pic.twitter.com/orLd4ck1Oo

— Entreprenarium (@Entreprenarium) November 25, 2019

In a bid to change the status quo in the women and financing, AfDB launched the Affirmative Finance Action for Women in Africa (AFAWA) in 2016 in Zambia, with the aim to mobilise $3 billion of new lending by banks and financial institutions for women in Africa. G7 leaders also approved a package totalling $251 million in support of AFAWA during the summit this August.

• In 2018, AfDB partnered with Entreprenarium to train 1,000 female entrepreneurs on business development and financial management across the continent.

Kennedy Uzoka, the Group Managing Director for United Bank of Africa (UBA Group) echoed Adesina’s remarks, telling IPS that women should not be held back because they do not own property.

“Access to finance is a problem for everybody, but it is worse for women. Commercial banking in most jurisdictions want collateral and so right from the beginning, women are disadvantaged because they have no assets,” Uzoka said.

• The continent has a $42 billion financing gap between men and women.
• It is projected that closing the gender gap in Africa will boost the global economy by $28 trillion by 2025.

Josephine Anan-Ankomah, the Group Executive of Commercial Bank, which is part of the Ecobank Group, believes that technology can help bridge the financial divide between men and women.

• The bank has a digital payment system called EcobankPay which also provides women who use this service with loans, even if their cash flow is inconsistent.

“We need to innovate and lend the woman against the cash flow that they are bringing and we must prepare to structure their facility such that it doesn’t have a fixed tenant base on what they earn,” she told IPS.

Rwanda’s First Lady Jeannette Kagame has championed for the country to be gender mindful. She told participants that women being disadvantaged must be a thing of the past, adding that policy makers must be deliberate in placing women and girls, at the heart of transformative strategies and decisions.

“It calls for each of us to play our role: Women and girls – we must organise and be each other’s keepers. Youth – you must be proactive in taking your life in your own hands and calling out inequality wherever it is perceived. You have what it takes to thrive, in this fast-changing world,” she said.

• Rwanda already has the greatest ratio of gender representation in parliament in the world — with 61 % of its parliamentarians being women.

Kagame further called on partners and stakeholders  to be innovative and relentless in their commitments to invest in women and girls and to level the playing field for all.

During the summit, participants joined the rest of the world to honour the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence. The 16 days kicks off on Nov. 25 each year, which marks International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women and runs until December 10th.

Ethiopia’s President Zewde said that there would be no progress on the continent if girls were left behind.

“It’s time to move from rhetoric to action, from words to deeds. We have to have the humility to go back down the ladder to make a difference,” she said.

** Writing with Nalisha Adams in Johannesburg

Kenya’s Lake Turkana Wind Power project opened in July is generates 300 MW of wind power. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Nalisha Adams
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, Nov 11 2019 (IPS)

Africa, where close to half of its 1.2 billion people have access to electricity, is set to become a world leader in renewable energy. As global business and development leaders met in Johannesburg, South Africa, to attend the Africa Investment Forum (AIF), held Nov. 11 to 13, one of the key focuses of the deals being discussed was around sustainable, renewable energy.

Organised by the African Development Bank (AfDB) and its various partners, the forum is expected to see $67 billion in deals closed over the next few days.

Leaders are doing all they can to encourage investment

In attendance where heads of state from South Africa, Ghana, Rwanda and Mozambique. At an invitation-only discussion among the leaders, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame said there was a lot of progress in Africa as a whole.

“I have always thought it was Africa’s time. We African’s have let ourselves down, we are now realising it has always been our time. And we are now seize every opportunity and be where we should be by now,” Kagame said.

• Kagame was the driver of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) during his time as chair of the African Union in 2018. The agreement had not been in existence during the first AIF last year.
• Established in March 2019, the AfCFTA has now been signed by 54 of the 55 African member states.

Alain Ebobisse, CEO of Africa 50, the Pan-African infrastructure investment platform capitalised by the AfDB, said that there was a consensus from African leaders that they needed to do whatever they could to attract more private investment. He said that the AIF attendance showed that there was a changing narrative for investment on the continent.

• Earlier figures had been revealed by the South African premier of Gauteng Province, David Makhura, that over 2,000 delegates were in attendance from 109 countries. Of this, only 40 percent where from Africa with the majority of investors attending from Asia, Europe and the Americas.
• Gauteng is South Africa’s wealthiest province and includes the financial centres of Johannesburg and Sandton, as well as the seat of government in Pretoria. 

Renewable energy on a positive trajectory   

Ebobisse said that a lot was already happening on the continent and while the media focused on the challenges there were huge success stories too — like the 1.5 GW Benban Solar Park in Egypt, which is the world’s largest solar photovoltaic plant.

“I’m sure that people are not talking enough about this major achievement which is the Benban Solar Programmer, 1.5 GW of solar that was invested mostly by the private sector in a record time,” he said.

• Africa 50 invested in 400 MW in that project and completed it from design to commercial operations in two and a half years.

Ebobisse went on to highlight Kenya’s opening this July of the Lake Turkana Wind Power project, which at a generation capacity of 300 MW makes it the largest wind power project on the continent.

“It was funded by the private sector,” Ebobisse told the media. He also looked towards Senegal which was implementing many independent power producers or IPPs in the solar sector.

“So there is a lot that is happening. We need to also widely understand the challenges and understand what is happening on the ground. And people are actually making good money in this investment. And there is nothing wrong about that. Let’s celebrate those successes,” he said.

African Development Bank President Akinwumi Adesina said today the bank had doubled its investment in climate finance from $12 billion to $25 billion by 2020. Credit: Nalisha Adams/IPS

Making Africa a world leader in renewables

A few weeks ago, the Governors of the AfDB met in Cote d’Ivoire’s capital Abidjan, approving a historic $115 billion increase to the bank’s authorised capital base to $208 billion. “This is the highest capital increase in the history of the bank since its establishment in 1964,” AfDB president Akinwumi Adesina said today.

During the October announcement Adesina had said that a significant portion of funding would be invested in climate change.

Today, in response to a question from IPS, Adesina further explained that the bank had doubled its investment in climate finance from $12 billion to $25 billion by 2020.

“Almost 50 percent of our finance will be going to climate adaptation as opposed to climate mitigation. So we are the first multilateral development bank to actually reach that balance in terms of adaptation and mitigation,” he said.

• Climate mitigation is the actions taken to reduce or curb greenhouse gases, thereby addressing the causes of climate change to prevent future warming. However, climate adaptation addresses how to live with the impacts of climate change.

“I believe that coal is the past. I believe that renewable energy is the future and we as a bank are investing in not in the past, but in the future in making sure that we are investing in solar energy, in hydro energy, in wind, all types of renewable energy that Africa needs,” Adesina said.

“We want Africa to lead in renewable energy.”

He said one of the projects was the AfDB’s Green Baseload Facility, which according to the bank, aims “to accelerate the transition towards more sustainable baseload power generation options and prevent countries from locking themselves into environmentally damaging and potentially economically costly technologies”.

“It’s a $500-million facility that we have set up to support countries that want to shift out of fuel-based energy into renewable energy and providing access to finance at a cheaper rate to be able to make that transition,” Adesina said.

• The bank’s biggest investment is the Desert to Power project, which was announced in December at the United Nations’ Climate Conference in Katowice, Poland.
• The initiative plans to supply 10 GW of solar energy by 2025 to 250 million people across 11 Sahelian countries. 

“That would make it the largest solar zone in the world,” Adesina stated. The bank will work in partnership with various investors to also establish plants on the continent that will manufacture the solar panels for the project.

• The AfDB has always stated “a lack of energy remains a significant impediment to Africa’s economic and social development“.
• According to AfDB, energy poverty in Africa is estimated to cost the continent 2 to 4  percent  GDP annually.

Africa’s climate crisis

The continent is facing climate change impact with rising temperatures and reduced rainfall.

The Sahel, which lies between The Sahara and the Sudanian Savanna, offers a blaze of sunlight with little rain as it is the region where temperatures are rising faster than anywhere else on Earth, according to the Great Green Wall initiative, a project that aims to reverse desertification and land degradation in the area.   

Last month, IPS reported that as The Sahara desert continues to expand, it tears apart families, forces migration from rural areas to cities and has contributed to conflict for precious resources of water, land and food.  

In July, IPS reported that the parts of Kenya had already warmed to above 1.5˚C — a figure deemed acceptable by global leaders during the 2015 Paris Agreement. But at such high temperatures a study found that over the last four decades livestock some Kenyan counties had decline by almost a quarter because of the temperature increase over time.

• During the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in Paris in 2015, all countries committed under the Paris Agreement to “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C”.
• But last year the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a special report warning that the world would face the risk of extreme heat, drought, floods and poverty at a temperature rise of 1.5°C.

Siby Diabira, regional head for Southern Africa and the Indian Ocean for PROPARCO, a subsidiary of Agence Française de Développement (AFD) focused on private sector development, told IPS that last year the group did $1.76 billion in investment deals, half of which was in Africa. Credit: Nalisha Adams/IPS

However, the forum showed that there remain a number of investors looking to provide funding for renewables and other development project on the continent. 

Siby Diabira, regional head for Southern Africa and the Indian Ocean for PROPARCO, a subsidiary of Agence Française de Développement (AFD) focused on private sector development, told IPS that last year the group did $1.76 billion in investment deals, half of which was in Africa. The AIF was still in its early stages to make a pronouncement on the success of the deals, Diabira said, but “so far so good”.

Diabira said the French development agencies aimed to be 100 percent compliant with the Paris Agreement and hence were investing heavily in renewable energy.

• She explained that PROPARCO was involved in “all types of renewable energy from hydro to solar to wind”, adding that there was a need for a mix of both traditional and renewable energy generation.

“I have been attending some of the boardroom [discussions]. It is a quite interesting gathering to have for the second year and to have so many different types of investors and projects that are raising funds for these types of events,” she said.

“We have been present in financing the first few rounds of renewable energy projects in South Africa and our idea is also as a [Development Financial Institution] DFI to be able to contribute to create this market for the commercial banks to come with us on those types of projects,” Diabira said.

Admassu Tadesse, President of the Trade and Development Bank, also pointed out that partnership agreements among the various banks and partners had strengthen their position in deals.

“If you have smart partnerships you can scale up collectively. With the African Development Bank we have signed a risk participation agreement to the tune of $300 million, which will allow us to move speedily into fields and have partners coming into deals alongside us.”

He said they expected to soon sign a deal with the European Investment Bank (EIB) that will again strengthen their position.

EIB vice president Ambroise Fayolle said they were attending this year with great intentions to develop transactions. He said it came on the back of their 2018 record year of investments in the continent, which amounted to some $3.6 billion — more than 50 percent of which was in the private sector. The bank signed 3 partnerships already, he said, none of which would have been possible without the AIF.

And as Adesina stated in a video message at the start of the forum, “Let the deals begin”.

Traders transporting goods in Mali. Thanks to the African Development Bank (AfDB), infrastructure linking African nations has made cross-border transportation of goods easier. Courtesy: Mary Newcombe/ CC by 2.0

By Issa Sikiti da Silva
COTONOU, Benin, Nov 8 2019 (IPS)

Buses carrying cross-border traders and goods from Cotonou in Benin to Bamako in Mali have recently been using the Lomé route — travelling through the capital of Togo and then getting onto the Ouagadougou corridor on their way to the Malian capital.

“The Lomé-Ouaga route is smooth and there are no potholes. It makes life easier for both drivers and passengers. Long distance travels needs good roads because it is very challenging for transporters and thousands of traders who depend on this business to survive,” Ali Oumarou, a transporter who travels the 950 km route, tells IPS in while in Benin’s commercial capital, Cotonou.

• The construction and rehabilitation of the Lomé-Ouagadougou corridor is 70 percent funded by the African Development Bank (AfDB).
• The AfDB is rehabilitating the Lomé-Ouagadougou corridor, repaving 300 km of road and training young people in road maintenance. The project has increased traffic volumes and reduced journey times, generating trade across the region, the AfDB, headquartered in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, said last week.
• The AfDB said that it has provided $238 million as a financial support for the project. 

“Bank investments in regional infrastructure are helping to improve connectivity across Africa, linking rural areas to towns and cities, linking producers and consumers across national boundaries, promoting trade and investment and building regional markets,” the AfDB pointed out.

Traders and those transporting goods and people across these routes have appreciated the new infrastructure. “This road has cut short our journeys and helped us a lot. Before we used to travel for six days to Ouaga from Lomé due to the bad state of the road, but since the road was rehabilitated, it only takes us two days, depending on the condition of the car,” Vincent, a long distance driver, told IPS.

• There is much more that the AfDB has done to link Africa’s cities.  
• The Addis-Mombasa highway is another example. “The 895 km highway corridor linking Kenya and Ethiopia has not only eased cross-border traffic between the two countries, it has also enhanced economic integration, resulting in jobs and improved livelihoods across the region,” the bank said.
• The AfDB, which has a AAA rating, supports numerous projects across that continent that contribute to growth, creating jobs and household income, and increasing government revenue, among others.

Reinvigorated by the successes harvested under the GCI-VI, during which it had a capital of $90 billion, the AfDB has embarked on the capital increase exercise to do much more to improve the citizens’  lives of its member states.

Last week, the Governors of the AfDB met in Cote d’Ivoire’s capital Abidjan, approving a historic $115 billion increase to the bank’s authorised capital base to $208 billion.

According to AfDB President Akinwumi Adesina,  “We have achieved a lot, yet there is still a long way to go. Our responsibility is to very quickly help improve the quality of life for the people of Africa. This general capital increase represents a very strong commitment of all our shareholders to see better quality projects that will significantly have an impact on the lives of the people in Africa –  in cities, in rural communities, and for millions of youth and women.”

The funds are expected to improve the lives of:

• 105 million people who will have access to new or improved electricity connections;
• 244 million people who will benefit from improvements in agriculture;
• 15 million people who will benefit from investment projects;
• 252 million people who will benefit from improved access to transport;
• and 128 million people who will benefit from improved access to water and sanitation.

One of the key focuses of the bank going forward will be climate change. The bank currently invests in various climate change projects, such as the Desert to Power initiative, which will help supply electricity to 250 million people in 11 countries across the Sahel by tapping into the region’s abundant solar resources.

But going forward it will be doubling its investments, AfDB’s president said.

“We as a bank had said we are going to double our financing for climate change…so the shareholders strongly supported that direction…They are asking that we do a lot more on climate,” Adesina said.

Tumi Solange Akinloye, political and international relations commentator, told  IPS of the increase, “this simply means that there will be more money for African countries to loan, which will serve to continue carrying out their projects, for the betterment of their people.”

The general capital increase comes ahead of the AfDB’s Africa Investment Forum —  a platform to attract private sector finance.

The forum was launched last year by the Bank and its partners. This year it will take place from Nov. 11 to 13 in South Africa. The forum has been lauded by Africa’s CEOs as changing the investment narrative for Africa.

“I am an optimist on Africa. My optimism does not imply non-awareness of the challenges facing the continent, but stems from a conviction that the best of Africa lies ahead of us,” Adesina said at the North American launch of the forum last year.

Female subsistence farmers, who according to the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa form more than 70 percent of farmers in Africa. Last week USAID announced $70 million of investment into research for new seeds and methods to reduce the impact of droughts and disease on crops across the developing world. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By James Reinl
DES MOINES, United States , Oct 21 2019 (IPS)

Experts vaunted new strains of seeds, drone aircraft and other technological breakthroughs as solutions-in-the-making for farmers in Africa, where hunger, drought and food price hikes are continent-wide problems.

At the gathering of nutritionists in the 2019 Borlaug Dialogue International Symposium, held annually in Des Moines, Iowa, in the United States, hopes were pinned on a new generation of so-called ‘agro-entrepreneurs’ in Africa.

At the event, USAID administrator Mark Green announced $70 million of investment into research for new seeds and methods to reduce the impact of droughts and disease on crops across the developing world.

“Humanitarian assistance, including food assistance, is treatment, not cure,” said Green. “We must develop new technologies and partnerships that will not only assist displaced families in crisis settings, but offer them livelihood opportunities wherever they can find them.”

The three-day gathering, which ended on Friday, saw some 1,200 experts, policy chiefs, executives and farmers from more than 65 countries tackle food scarcity and price hikes — blights that disproportionately hurt sub-Saharan Africa.

Jennifer Blanke, vice president for agriculture human and social development at the African Development Bank (AfDB) said Africa “missed out” on the green revolution that bumped up harvests across Asia and Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s.

But with new technologies — from unmanned “drone” aircraft to new strains of more resilient crop seeds — coming online, African farmers and policymakers have an opportunity to get agriculture back on track and boost harvests.

“You can do so many things with technology,” said Blanke.

“With drones, you can survey your fields in a minute, which would have taken hours and hours previously. You can spray pesticides. Satellite technology allows you to see what’s happening to weather systems. Basic mobile technology helps farmers in rural areas know what prices they can get for their food.”

In the coming months, Blanke aims to bring together researchers, policymakers and investors to foster helpful policies and roll out schemes to buy and spread technology as well as training farmers and officials how to use it.

Dozens of young African entrepreneurs traveled to Des Moines to network, woo investors and brainstorm ideas for addressing Africa’s worrying problem of producing enough food for a growing population.

They included Ifeoluwa Olatayo, from Nigeria, who was awarded a fellowship from the World Hunger Fighters Foundation, for building small hydroponic farms on rooftops in Ibadan, in Oyo State, for growing lettuce, cucumbers and other vegetables

“Since we’re planting in close proximity to consumers, we’re able to create fast and easy access to nutritious foods while at the same time lessening the impact of transportation on the whole agricultural value chain,” said Olatayo.

“It’s important that people have access to nutritious foods, as affordable and as fresh as possible.” 

Other agro-entrepreneurs are tackling another problem for African farmers — the fact that, thanks to bad roads, poor transport and other woes, entire harvests rot beside the fields they were grown in and never reach market.

Other start-ups involve distributing new varieties of seeds that are more resilient to insects and disease, yield bigger harvests, provide more nutrients, and in some cases taste better than the crops they are replacing.

Lourena Arone Maxwell, from Mozambique, which has been ravaged by disease and droughts since cyclones Idai and Kenneth killed more than 600 people earlier this year, is focussed on fighting crop diseases.

“Plant diseases can reduce the amount of food that farmers have and the solution is a very affordable and environmentally-friendly method to control them,” Maxwell said on the sidelines of an event to honour the first batch of fellows.

The extraction of natural resources across Africa, including minerals like gold, is being affected by a changing climate. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Oct 7 2019 (IPS)

As a result of climate change, resource extraction industries in Africa will be impacted by asset stranding, researchers say.

“Stranding implies that several natural assets are going to become commercially unviable around the world as a result of climate change and the inability of countries to exploit them,” said Vanessa Ushie, manager of the policy analysis division at the African Natural Resources Centre of the African Development Bank (AfDB), which supports African countries to leverage their natural resources for sustainable development.

Ushie told IPS stranding is an increasingly important policy issue that African countries should consider because they are highly dependent on natural resources, with an average 70 percent of their exports being minerals.

As the continent struggles to reach its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of global goals identified by the United Nations to end poverty and inequality among member states, a wealth of natural resources that could be used for Africa’s development remain  largely untapped.

• Some 30 percent of the world’s mineral reserves including platinum, gold, diamonds and coal are found in Africa, yet the continent still has high levels of poverty. 
• Africa also has 10 percent of the world’s oil reserves and 8 percent of natural gas, according to the African Development Bank.
• Climate change is threatening the exploitation of these resources and more importantly of the non-renewable energy sources; coal, oil and gas.

Keep them in the ground

As a result of the impact of climate change, Africa has difficult options when it comes to its mineral resources, researchers say. Can it keep the resources in the ground and risk economic stagnation or find profitability in clean energy sources?

“We are aware of the Paris Agreement and the commitment of African countries, just like their global counterparts, to reduce carbon emissions in order to meet the target of keeping global warming below 2°Celsius,” Ushie said. “With that warming target, it is clear that certain minerals will have to be left below the ground especially those that emit the highest carbon into the atmosphere.”

• The AfDB says “stranded assets” have in recent years attracted a lot of interest, as climate-driven changes justify a shift to low-carbon development in the natural resources sector. More than 185 countries have agreed to leave two-thirds of proven fossil fuels in the ground to meet the Paris Agreement climate target.
• In 2017, the International Energy Agency warned that oil and gas assets worth 1.3 trillion dollars could be left stranded by 2050, if the fossil fuel industry does not adapt to greener climate policies.

Speaking at the end of the U.N. Climate Action Summit recently, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former president of Ireland, Mary Robinson, said world leaders should act on the outrage of millions of people around the world who marched against climate change and calling for an end to the use of fossil fuels.

“We urge all nations to commit to achieving carbon neutrality before 2050 to immediately end construction of, and investment in, coal power and to implement a green transition that is just and equitable,” Robinson said.

Stranded assets

But many African countries are extracting coal, gas and oil with new discoveries, signalling future fortunes that could be difficult to forfeit.

• In 2019, French oil firm Total made public its discovery of a large “gas condensate” in South Africa. The gas condensate – effectively a liquid form of natural gas – is a more prized than crude oil.
• In Kenya, British oil company Tullow Oil projected 2024 as the earliest likely date by which the country can expect gains from its Turkana oil. Vast oil reserves have also been discovered in Uganda.

For the African continent, a latecomer to the fossil fuel boom, arguments for asset stranding could influence development gains and also interrupt economic growth.

Ushie said some assets will be stranded due to changes in markets and investment flows, as global extractive companies and investors adjust their portfolios to meet new, low-carbon regulations. Other extractive assets are at risk due to changing consumer demand, such as the growing use of solar energy and electric vehicles in developed countries.

An opportunity or obstacle?

“With growing climate change and the ensuing low-carbon transition, Africa’s mining sector faces serious risks, and some opportunities,” Ushie told IPS, noting that African countries need to understand and respond to the new normal.

The AfDB is promoting a diversified approach to energy provision and integrated natural resource management.  The solution lies in investing in localised and resource-efficient energy options like decentralised, community-owned local solar, wind and biomass projects.

By 2020, the Bank will have contributed $17 billion to climate finance for African since it developed a funding mechanism through its Climate Change Action Plan. Besides, the Bank’s Africa NDC Hub has supported African countries to implement their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement and helping countries attract sustainable financing opportunities such as green bonds to support climate change adaptation in high risk countries.

Research evidence for low carbon policies

“We want to model scenarios under which stranding could occur for various minerals and fossil fuels, and provide policy advice to governments on how they could respond to this risk,” said Ushie. “There should be a robust public debate on stranded mineral assets and resources, and this is why the AfDB is engaged in policy platforms such as the Inter-Governmental Forum on Mining, Metals and Sustainable Development.”

The Intergovernmental Forum on Mining, Minerals, Metals and Sustainable Development to be held in Geneva, Oct. 7-11 , has the theme; “Mining in a changing climate’”, indicating that even at a global level, there is recognition that resource extraction is being impacted by climate change.

The forum is a good opportunity for the Centre and the Bank to be engaged in global policy dialogue on the future of mining, which is a critical industry in Africa, she said.

Fatima Denton, Director of the U.N. University’s Institute for Natural Resource, told IPS the global shift from fossil fuels and the drop-in technology costs of renewables are an opportunity for the African continent to increase investment in green energy sources.

With rapid urbanisation of most African economies, coupled with a rising demand for electricity, African nations have begun taking advantage of this opportunity to increase investment in renewables, Denton said.

A 2018 study by Bloomberg Finance indicates that developing countries are beginning to lead the global clean power transition. A total 114GW zero-carbon power capacity was added in developing countries in 2017 compared to 63GW added in wealthier nations.

With the drop in global gas prices, more African nations were focusing on growing their gas economies. Renewables have greater need for metals and materials, creating opportunities for African countries with reserves of these resources essential to the construction of wind, solar, electricity transmission.

“Despite the opportunities mentioned above there is the challenge of when African economies will actually strand their fossil fuel assets and the lack of funding to invest in green growth opportunities as stated in their NDC’s,” Denton said.

Energy security in a low carbon future entails transition towards clean renewable sources, not as an end in itself, but as a means to achieving sustainable development in critical sectors such as agriculture, mining, health and education, said Denton.

The African Development Bank (AfDB) has been investing in projects to assist African countries adapt to climate change. Seven out of the 10 most vulnerable countries to climate change are located on the continent even though Africa contributes less than 4 percent of world greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). However, Africa needs between 7-15 billion dollars every year to adapt to the impacts of climate change, according to the AfDB. Pictured here is a wind energy generation plant located in Loiyangalani in northwestern Kenya. The plant is set to be the biggest in Africa, generating 300 MW. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 27 2019 (IPS)

African Development Bank (AfDB) President Akinwumi Adesina unveiled millions of dollars of new pledges at the United Nations this week amid growing fears of climate change ravaging the continent and derailing anti-poverty targets.

At a gathering of world leaders in New York, Adesina disclosed commitments on tackling global warming, a massive solar energy project in the Sahel, and an insurance scheme that poor countries can access when the next cyclone strikes. 

“Africa has been shortchanged by climate change, but it should not be shortchanged by climate finance,” Adesina told reporters at a press conference at the start of the U.N. General Assembly. 

The AfDB would double its climate financing to emerging economies to 25 billion dollars from 2020-2025, half of which would help governments adapt to droughts, rising tides and other impacts of climate change, said Adesina.

The bank would also help raise 250 million dollars to fund co-payments for insurance premiums so that disaster-prone countries get cashback when extreme weather events wreak chaos on their economies, said Adesina.

“Poor countries didn’t cause climate change, they shouldn’t be holding the short end of the stick,” said Adesina.

Another 20 million dollars would fund the Sahel’s new ‘Desert to Power’ solar scheme, for generating 10,000 MW of clean electricity for some 250 million people, including 90 million rural folks who live far from a power grid, said Adesina.

“This will make the Sahel the Baobab of energy,” said Adesina, referencing the hardy African tree. 

Such funding is welcome, but may not be enough. Africa needs between 7-15 billion dollars every year to adapt to the impacts of climate change, said Adesina. 

More broadly, the continent needs between 130–170 billion dollars of investment in power plants, internet cables and other infrastructure each year, leaving a funding gap of some 68-108 billion dollars, according to AfDB data.

Benedict Okey Oramah, President of Afreximbank, a trade finance body, said African economies had to work harder to train workers and expand their markets to lure investors to the continent.

“Countries which are fragmented are small markets, they cannot be of interest to people who want to put money to grow in a massive way,” Oramah told a meeting of African leaders at the U.N. on Wednesday. 

“We have to build again the technical schools that we used to have, we have to build universities of science and technology so that we can have the right skills to take up the kinds of jobs that are beginning to emerge.”

Talks came amid concerns from teen Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, U.N. chief Antonio Guterres and many others that the world was not on track for slashing emissions of heat-trapping gases.

Guterres, secretary-general of the world body, warned that while countries were making progress towards the U.N.’s so-called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), more efforts were needed.

“Let us be clear — we are far from where we need to be. We are off track,” said Guterres. “Deadly conflicts, the climate crisis, gender-based violence, and persistent inequalities are undermining efforts to achieve the goals.”

The 17 SDGs were agreed by the U.N.’s 193 member states in 2015 in an effort to curb war, climate change, famine, land degradation, gender-based inequality, and other global ills by 2030.

Progress is being made in access to energy, to decent work, and in battling poverty and child mortality, but youth unemployment has plateaued and global hunger and gender inequality continue to rise, the U.N. says.

In an impassioned address to a U.N. climate summit on Monday, youth activist Thunberg raged at world leaders in a crowd that briefly included United States President Donald Trump and his entourage.

“You have stolen my dreams, my childhood, with your empty words,” said Thunberg, 16. “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about are your fairy tales of money and eternal economic growth.”

A new report, Fixing the Business of Food, advocates the aligning of business practices to the SDGs. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Nalisha Adams and Busani Bafana
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa/BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Sep 16 2019 (IPS)

Arama Sire Camara, a fruit and vegetable seller in the province of Kindia, some 135 km from the Guinean capital of Conakry, feels safer trading well into the night thanks to the Rural Electrification Project, financed by 21-million-dollar investment by the African Development Bank.

“With lighting on the road at night and illuminating our goods, it means we are safer, especially with all the cars on the road. You can work for longer after nightfall, and so we can make more of our products,” she says.

Shuaibu Yusuf, a farmer from Nigeria, can now not only afford to pay for the food for his family thanks to his high yields that are resultant of the high-quality fertiliser he is able to access through the AfDB programme, Feed Africa, but he can also pay his children’s educational costs and his family’s medical bills.

In South Africa’s Limpopo province, Sarina Malatji, now a 39-year-old mother of three, grew up in an area where access to education was limited. But thanks to investment from AfDB in the state power utility Eskom’s Medupi Leadership Initiative and the Eskom Contractors Academy, her life now is a far cry from her childhood. She is now the owner of her own cleaning business – Green Dot – which currently employs 115 people at the Medupi power plant, one of the largest energy projects in the country. She says the skills she learned through the leadership initiative helped her grown her business.

These are just the stories of a few people who have been the beneficiaries of investments made by the AfDB across the continent.

From supporting the construction of a 563 km power transmission line in Mozambique as part of a commitment to aid post cyclone Idai recovery through restoration of livelihoods and infrastructure; to singing a 28.8-million-dollar grant deal with Somalia for road and water projects; to signing a 4.8-million-dollar grant with the African Union for a continental free trade secretariat; and to committing to pool its resources with other stakeholders to counter food insecurity on the continent. This year has already seen the AfDB make a huge footprint in terms of development.

Last year, the bank’s Global Benchmark programme successfully launched two large global benchmark issuances in the dollar market of two billion dollars each and a 1.25 billion euro 10-year bond.

“Africa will develop not through aid but through the discipline of investments,” AfDB President Akinwumi Adesina said, noting that the bank and partners had launched the Africa Investment Forum in 2018, which raised 38.7 billion dollars in investment deals.

But as the AfDB wrapped up the 20th annual meeting of world’s leading financial institutions last week at the bank’s headquarters in Abidjan, Cote D’Ivoire, plans are underway for a renewed push for Africa’s development as the bank lobbies for a general capital increase from shareholders.

The bank is committed to assisting Africa tap into its potential to be a competitive global investment destination with Charles Boamah, senior Vice President of the bank, citing talks around the general capital increase, stating that “this is a pivotal year, a year in which very, very important decisions are being made about what kind of bank we want to have for the next 20 years.”

Earlier this year, Canada committed 1.1 billion dollars in temporary callable capital to support AfDB. Canada also urged other AAA-rated member countries to join Canada in providing support to the bank.

At the time Adesina welcomed the announcement saying it was a “huge boost”. He said that it would allow the bank to “strengthen its Triple A rating and increase lending to member countries while discussions are ongoing among all shareholders for a general capital increase.” Canada has been a member of the AfDB since 1983 and is the 4th-largest shareholder among the bank’s non-regional member countries.

Adesina was in Japan at the end of August to attend the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) where he told Japanese companies, “Africa presents a compelling return for investors”.

The AfDB is upbeat about Africa’s economic growth, which it has supported through various funding services availed to its 54 regional member countries.

In 2018, Africa recorded real GDP growth of 3.5 percent, the bank said in its 2018 annual report. This is a positive development for harnessing new investment on the continent.

The bank said 17 African countries achieved real GDP growth higher than 5 percent in 2018, and 21 countries showed growth between 3 and 5 percent. Only five African countries recorded a recession in 2018, down from eight in the two previous years. Six of the world’s 10-fastest growing economies are African nations, which include Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Libya, Rwanda, and Senegal.

According to the bank, some non-resource-rich countries had high growth rates in 2018, including Côte d’Ivoire (7.4 percent), Rwanda (7.2 percent), and Senegal (7 percent), supported by agricultural production, consumer demand, and public investment.

Economic fundamentals in most African countries continued to improve, the bank said, attributing this to fiscal consolidation and massive investments in infrastructure, major inroads in financial innovation, increased domestic demand, and substantial improvements in the investment climate.

Developing Africa

Convinced of Africa’s strong economic growth potential, the bank has continued to invest in various sectors. In 2018, the bank approved lending worth 9.95 billion dollars under its High 5s programmes — five programmes that focus on key sectors:

• Light Up and Power Africa, approvals amounted to 1.9 billion dollars, 23 percent more than in  2017, with 447 MW in new total power capacity being installed—197 MW of it renewable. Close to 90 percent of bank lending was focused on investment in infrastructure.
• Feed Africa, saw 19 million people provided with improved agricultural technologies, with 1,700 tons of agricultural inputs (fertilisers, seeds, etc) provided. Almost 1.54 billion dollars was approved in 2018 to transform agriculture on the continent.
• Industrialise Africa saw 154,000 owner-operators and micro, small, and medium enterprises provided with access to financial services. Additional loans  supported  activities  across  a  wide  range of manufacturing and services in the private sector. 
• Integrate Africa has seen about 14 million people gaining access to better transport services. The bank approved investments to the value of over one billion dollars, and to invested more than 20  million dollars over the past five years in trade agreement support and in cross-border transport, and energy soft infrastructure.
• Improve the Quality of Life for the People of Africa, project saw 8 million people benefit from improved access to water and sanitation.

“By any measure, these numbers and impacts are impressive,” said Adesina. “But the needs in Africa are enormous. That is why the bank is engaged in discussions with its shareholders for a General Capital Increase to do much more for Africa—toward Agenda 2063.”

Risks remain

Despite Africa’s GDP growing by an estimated 3.5 percent in 2018, the continent’s economic growth is threatened by domestic risks such as climate change, security and migration concerns, increasing vulnerability to debt distress in some countries, and uncertainties associated with elections and political transitions, the bank said, recommending significant private sector investment and external funding  in regional infrastructure and financing.

On average, Africa’s fiscal deficit declined from 5.8 percent in 2017 to an estimated 4.5 percent in 2018, while inflation fell from 12.6 percent in 2017 to 10.9 percent in 2018. However, the bank lamented that these growth rates remained insufficient to address the persistent challenges of high unemployment, low agricultural productivity, inadequate infrastructure, and fiscal and current deficits as well as debt vulnerabilities.

Although tax revenues and spending efficiency have improved, domestic resource mobilisation has generally remained well short of potential, said the bank, noting that 16 African countries were classified as being in debt distress or at high risk of debt distress at the end of 2018. The bank urged the strengthening of the debt-investment links to ensure a high social return on debt-financed public investments.

“I am optimistic about Africa’s future. I am confident in our capacity as a Bank to make a greater impact on the lives of millions of people across this beloved continent we have been called to serve,” Adesina said, adding that, “We need universal access to electricity. We must help make Africa self-sufficient in food. We must fully integrate the continent. We must industrialise the continent. And we must improve the quality of life for the people of Africa.”

Credit: AfDB

By Razeena Raheem
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 13 2019 (IPS)

When UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres launched the International Solar Alliance last October, he applauded the goal of mobilizing about $1 trillion dollars towards the deployment of some 1,000 gigawatts of solar energy by 2030.

“It is clear,” he said, “that we are witnessing a global renewable energy revolution.”

That revolution is also taking place under the leadership of the African Development Bank (AfDB) which has embarked on a highly ambitious solar project to make Africa a renewable power-house, titled “Desert to Power (DtP) Initiative”.

This project is expected to stretch across the Sahel region by tapping into the region’s abundant solar resource.

The Initiative aims to develop and provide 10 GW of solar energy by 2025 and supply 250 million people with green electricity including in some of the world’s poorest countries. At least 90 million people will be connected to electricity for the first time, lifting them out of energy poverty.

Currently, 64% of the Sahel’s population – covering Senegal, Nigeria, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, Sudan, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Eritrea – lives without electricity, a major barrier to development, with consequences for education, health and business.

The AfDB has rightly pointed out that lack of energy remains a significant impediment to Africa’s economic and social development.

Initiated back in 2017 by the AfDB, the DtP has been described “a big and bold ambition: to light up and power the Sahel by building electricity generation capacity of 10 GW through photovoltaic (PV) solar systems via public, private, grid and off-grid projects by 2025, and consequently transform the industry, agriculture and economic fabric of the entire region”

Akinwumi A. Adesina

Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, President of the African Development Bank, speaking in Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso where he attended the G5 Sahel Summit, emphasized the importance of political will in the success of the “Desert to Power” initiative, whose goal is to guarantee universal access to electricity for over 60 million people through solar energy.

The Burkinabe President Mark Roch Christian Kaboré applauded the Bank’s Desert to Power initiative, and also highlighted his country’s excellent relationship with the Bank, expressing his thanks for the portfolio of projects implemented. The President of AfDB is an invited guest at the G5 Sahel Summit of heads of state and government held on 13 September.

Dr. Adesina has drawn attention to the paradox that one of the world’s sunniest regions lacks access to electricity: “Now, more than ever, cooperation and cross-border trade in energy are essential to maintaining a secure supply over the long term given the challenges of climate change,” he said, adding that “in Burkina Faso, significant steps have been taken with the Bank-supported Yeleen rural electrification project.”

As part of its electrification strategy for Africa, the Bank is committed to accelerating access to high quality, low cost energy for the continent’s people. Critical network connections have been approved by the Bank’s Board: Mali-Guinea, Nigeria-Niger-Benin-Burkina Faso and Chad-Cameroon.

The Yeleen Rural Electrification Project, involving the production of off-grid energy in Burkina Faso, is the first venture under the DtP initiative.

A low-income Sahelian country, Burkina Faso has been negatively impacted by extreme climate variations such as declining rainfall, rising temperatures, floods and droughts. With installed capacity of 285 MW, about 3 million households in Burkina Faso are completely without power.

Of Burkina Faso’s 19 million population, 90% live in rural areas, where electricity access – mostly through diesel generators – stands at just 3%. Agriculture, the mainstay of Burkina Faso’s rural economy, is also the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

The project is financed through the Bank’s African Development Fund, in addition to co-financing mobilised by the Bank from the Green Climate Fund (GCF), and the European Union. The project will also leverage private sector investments through equity and debt raised from commercial banks.

It will harness solar energy to deliver access to more than 900,000 people in rural areas – nearly 5% of the country’s population, and is expected to result in an average annual CO2 emissions reduction of 15,500 tons.

Meanwhile, Guterres said that renewable energy accounted for some 70 per cent of net additions to global power capacity in 2017.

Solar energy is at the centre of this revolution, he declared

“We need to rapidly shift away from our dependence on fossil fuels,” he said. “We need to replace them with clean energy from water, wind and sun. We must halt deforestation, restore degraded forests and change the way we farm.”

The alternative to moving to green energy, he said, “is a dark and dangerous future”.

According to AfDB, energy poverty in Africa is estimated to cost the continent 2-4 % GDP annually. The details of the “Desert to Power Initiative” were outlined as part of the Paris Agreement climate change talks at COP24 in Katowice, Poland.

“Energy is the foundation of human living – our entire system depends on it. For Africa right now, providing and securing sustainable energy is in the backbone of its economic growth,” said Magdalena J. Seol in the AfDB’s Desert to Power Initiative.

“A lack of energy remains as a significant impediment to Africa’s economic and social development. The project will provide many benefits to local people. It will improve the affordability of electricity for low income households and enable people to transition away from unsafe and hazardous energy sources, such as kerosene, which carry health risks,” added Seol.

Construction of the project will also create jobs and help attract private sector involvement in renewable energy in the region.

Putting the problem in its right perspective, Guterres said in the past decade, prices for renewables have plummeted and investments are on the rise. “Today, a fifth of the world’s electricity is produced by renewable energy. We must build on this.”

He said the world is seeing a groundswell of climate action.

“It is clear that clean energy makes climate sense. But it also makes economic sense. Today it is the cheapest energy. And it will deliver significant health benefits. Air pollution affects nearly all of us, regardless of borders.”

The Secretary-General encouraged businesses, governments and civil society organizations to disclose climate risk, divest from fossil fuels and forge partnerships that will invest in low-emissions resilient infrastructure.

“We need to do this from the biggest cities to the smallest towns. The opportunities are tremendous.” He said some 75 per cent of the infrastructure needed by 2050 still remains to be built.

“How this is done will either lock us in to a high emission future or steer us towards truly sustainable low-emissions development. There is only one rational choice.”

According to AfDB, many women-led businesses currently face bigger barriers than men-led enterprises to accessing grid electricity – so the project has the potential to increase female participation in economic activities and decision-making processes.

The project has been launched in collaboration with the Green Climate Fund, a global pot of money created by the 194 countries who are party to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), to support developing countries adapt to and mitigate climate change. The program is designed to combine private sector capital with blended finance.

“If you look at the countries that this initiative supports, they’re the ones who are very much affected by the climate change and carbon emissions from other parts of the world,” said Seol.

“Given this, the investments will have a greater effect in these regions, which have a greater demand and market opportunity in the energy sector.”

“Women are usually disproportionately negatively affected by energy access issues. Providing a secure and sustainable electricity creates positive impact on gender issue as well.”

The African continent holds 15% of the world’s population, yet is poised to shoulder nearly 50% of the estimated global climate change adaptation costs, according to the Bank.

These costs are expected to cut across health, water supply, agriculture, and forestry, despite the continent’s minimal contribution to global emissions.

However, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IREA) estimates that Africa’s renewable energy potential could put it at the forefront of green energy production globally.

It is estimated to have an almost unlimited potential of solar capacity (10 TW), abundant hydro (350 GW), wind (110 GW), and geothermal energy sources (15 GW) – and a potential overall renewable energy capacity of 310 GW by 2030.

Other renewables projects in Africa include The Ouarzazate solar complex in Morocco, which is one of the largest concentrated solar plants in the world.

It has produced over 814 GWh of clean energy since 2016 and last year, the solar plant prevented 217,000 tons of CO2 being emitted. Until recently, Morocco sourced 95% of its energy needs from external sources.

In South Africa, the Bank and its partner, the Climate Investment Funds, have helped fund the Sere Wind Farm – 46 turbines supplying 100 MW to the national power grid and expected to save 6 million tonnes of greenhouse gases over its 20-year expected life span. It is supplying 124,000 homes.

COP24 is the 24th conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This year countries are preparing to implement the Paris Agreement, which aims to limit the world’s global warming to no more than 2C.

Floods in Kenya's Turkana County, Lodwar town. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Isaiah Esipisu
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia, Aug 28 2019 (IPS)

African leaders have been asked to walk the talk, and lead from the front, in order to build resilience and adaptation to the adverse impacts of climate change on the continent.

This was the message conveyed by several speakers at the ongoing eighth Climate Change and Development in Africa (CCDA) conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

“Our first urgent action is to build the Resilience and Adaptation to the adverse impacts of climate change for the most vulnerable communities across Africa,” said Dr James Kinyangi, the Chief Climate Policy Officer at the African Development Bank (AfDB), as he articulated commitments by the Bank on tackling climate change.

“The time is now, to translate the (2015 Paris) agreement into concrete action, to safeguard development gains and address the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable,” he told the CCDA forum which brings together policy makers, civil society, youth, private sector, academia and development partners every year to discuss climate emerging issues and to review progress ahead of the UNFCCC Conference of Parties (COP).

“We must challenge our leaders to walk the talk, and lead from the front in the spirit of the UN Secretary General, who recently pointed out that beautiful speeches are not enough to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement,” said Mithika Mwenda, the Secretary General for the Pan Africa Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA) an umbrella organization of over 1000 Africa environment and climate civil society groups.

So far, 53 African countries have committed to Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to slow down the impact of climate change, identifying the need for an estimated USD 3.5 – 4 trillion of investment by 2030.

According to Kinyangi, these commitments present an opportunity for the AfDB to contribute to policies and actions that mobilise the financial resources needed to support long-term investments in resilience and Africa’s transition to low carbon development.

In a recently published interview, AfDB President Akinwumi Adesina said: “Africa cannot adapt to climate change through words. It can only adapt to climate change through resources.”

“Africa has been shortchanged in terms of climate change because the continent accounts for only 4 percent of greenhouse gas emissions but it suffers disproportionately from the negative impacts,” he declared.

He said AfDB is leading an effort to create an African Financial Alliance for climate, which will bring together financial institutions, stock exchanges, and central banks in Africa, to develop an endogenous financing model that would support Africa to adapt to climate change without depending on anybody else outside the continent.

Early this year, tropical cyclones, Idai and Kenneth ripped through five African countries – Mozambique, Malawi, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and the Comoros both within a period of one month.

Kenneth is on record as the strongest storm ever to make landfall, while Idai, is the worst ever storm in terms of loss and damages to hit the African continent, where more than 1,000 lives were lost with damage of property worth 1 billion US dollars.

“In Sudan, we have just won a democratic struggle, but we are faced by another catastrophic ecological crisis of monumental proportion, which, last week alone, killed at least 62 people and destroyed 37,000 homes,” said Nisreen Eslaim, a climate activist from Sudan, referring to floods that recently swept through the city of Khartoum.

Since the threat of floods, droughts and heatwaves will be amplified with increasing climate variability, experts believe that the best response strategy is one that improves the resilience of economies, infrastructure, ecosystems and societies to climate variability and change.

“As much as we are trying to respond to climate related calamities, we need longer-term action for disaster risk management. Hence, a reason why we must do whatever it takes to implement the Paris Agreement,” Kinyangi told IPS.

To support African countries adapt to climate change, AfDB has committed to ensuring that at least 40 percent of its project approvals are tagged as climate finance by 2020, with equal proportions for adaptation and mitigation. The bank also seeks to mainstream climate change and green growth initiatives into all investments by next year.

“As much as we will be mobilizing significantly, more new and additional climate finance, to Africa by 2020, we will keep pushing the rich countries to deliver on the pledged 100 billion dollars each year,” said Kinyangi.

“As we know, our leaders’ focus is slowly but surely turning to other issues dominating international diplomatic interactions such as Iran/US tiff, Brexit, Terrorism and the emerging extreme right-wing movements, which constitute a risk of increased climate scepticism,” said Mwenda.

“Our only hope is unity of purpose, and the purpose which brings us here in Addis Ababa – to contribute to a process which will shape the future of humanity and health of the planet,” added the PACJA boss.

According to Ambassador Josefa Sacko, the Commissioner for Rural Economy and Agriculture at the Africa Union Commission, there is need for increased ambition in the fight against climate change.

“Without ambitious and urgent global commitments to tackle climate change, the ability of most African countries to attain the Sustainable Development Goals and the ideals of Africa’s Agenda 2063 remain elusive,” she said.

Meanwhile, UN Secretary-General António Guterres, has convened a Climate Action Summit September 23 at the United Nations in New York, and has called on all leaders to come to the summit with concrete, ambitious and realistic plans to enhance their nationally determined contributions by 2020, in line with reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 45 per cent over the next decade, and to net zero emissions by 2050 as called for by the IPCC special report.

Rice fields in Northern Ghana. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Nafissatou Diouf
YOKOHAMA, Japan, Aug 28 2019 (IPS-Partners)

The Sasakawa Association will work with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), to help double rice production to 50 million tonnes by 2030.  Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made the announcement at the Sasakawa Africa Association (SAA) symposium held on Wednesday during TICAD7.

“Japanese technology can play a key role in innovation which is key to agriculture,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told delegates.

We want to help shift the mindset of small-holder farmers from producing-to-eat to producing-to-sell. We are hopeful that Africa’s youth can take agriculture to a new era, and that they can see a career path in agriculture

Yohei Sasakawa, Chairman of the Nippon foundation

Discussions at the Symposium focused on Africa’s youth bulge, unemployment rates, agricultural innovations and technologies, solutions and job creation opportunities in the agricultural sector.

“We’ve always believed in the agriculture potential of Africa,” said Yohei Sasakawa, Chairman of the Nippon foundation.  “We are paying more attention to income-generating activities. We want to help shift the mindset of small-holder farmers from producing-to-eat to producing-to-sell. We are hopeful that Africa’s youth can take agriculture to a new era, and that they can see a career path in agriculture,” he added.

In a keynote address, African Development Bank Group President, Akinwumi Adesina, called for urgent and concerted efforts to “end hunger”.

“In spite of all the gains made in agriculture. We are not winning the global war against hunger. We must all arise collectively and end global hunger. To do that, we must end hunger in Africa. Hunger diminishes our humanity,” Adesina urged.

According to the FAO’s 2019 State of Food and Security, the number of hungry people globally stands at a disconcerting 821 million. Africa alone accounts for 31% of the global number of hungry people – 251 million people.

Commending the Sasakawa Association’s late founder, Ryochi Sasakawa, for his tireless efforts in tackling hunger, Adesina said: “Passion, dedication and commitment to the development of agriculture and the pursuit of food security in our world has been the hallmark of your work.”

Between 1986 and 2003, Sasakawa Association in Africa, operated in a total of 15 countries including – Ghana, Sudan, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Benin, Togo, Mali, Guinea, Zambia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi and Mozambique.

Harnessing the potential of new technologies

Adesina expressed confidence in the ability of technology to deliver substantial benefits in agriculture. To accelerate Africa’s agricultural growth, the African Development Bank has launched the Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT) to deliver new technologies to millions of farmers. ‘TAAT has become a game changer, and is already delivering impressive results, Adesina said.

Working with 30 private seed companies, the TAAT maize compact produced over 27,000 tons of seeds of water efficient maize that was planted by 1.6 million farmers.

Tackling climate change: a top priority

Hiroyuki Takahashi, founder of Pocket Marche, a platform that connects Japanese farmers and producers with consumers, shared insights and lessons learnt from Japan’s experiences, historic cycles of climate disasters and the country’s rebound.

“The power to choose what we eat is the power to stop the climate crisis and bring sustainable happiness to a world with limited resources,” Takahashi said.

It is estimated that Africa will heat up 1.5 times faster than the global average and require $7-15 billion a year for adaptation alone. Limiting the impacts of climate change is expected to become a top priority for Africa.

“Africa has been short changed by climate change. But, it should not be short changed by climate finance,” Adesina said in his concluding remarks.

“Let’s be better asset managers for nature. For while we must eat today, so must future generations coming after us. It is our collective responsibility to ensure that we do not leave empty plates on the table for generations to come,” Adesina concluded.

Nafissatou Diouf is Communication and External Relations Department, African Development Bank

Excerpt:

The pastoralists of Ethiopia’s Somali region make a living raising cattle, camels and goats in an arid and drought-prone land. They are forced to move constantly in search of pasture and watering holes for their animals. Ahead of COP 24, African experts have identified the need to speak with one unified voice, saying a shift in the geopolitical landscape threatens climate negotiations. Credit: William Lloyd-George/IPS

By Friday Phiri
NAIROBI, Oct 18 2018 (IPS)

In December 2015, nations of the world took a giant step to combat climate change through the landmark Paris Agreement. But African experts who met in Nairobi, Kenya at last week’s Seventh Conference on Climate Change and Development in Africa (CCDA VII) say the rise of far-right wing and nationalist movements in the West are threatening the collapse of the agreement.
The landmark Paris Agreement focuses on accelerating and intensifying actions and investments needed for a sustainable low carbon future, through greenhouse-gas emissions mitigation, adaptation, finance, and technology transfer among others.

And as Parties struggle to complete the implementing measures needed to get the Paris regime up and running, African experts have identified the need to speak with one unified voice, saying a shift in the geopolitical landscape threatens climate negotiations.

“The rise of ‘the inward-looking nationalist right-wing movement and climate deniers’ in the West is a signal of hardening positions in potential inaction by those largely responsible for the world’s climate problems,” Mithika Mwenda, secretary general of the Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance, told the gathering.

Mwenda said civil society organisations were seeking collaboration with governments on the continent and stood ready to offer support as Africa seeks homegrown solutions to mitigate the effects of climate change.

“Our leaders who hold the key for the effective implementation of the Paris Agreement should remain candidly focused and resist attempts to scatter the unified African voice to deny Africa a strong bargain in the design of the Paris rulebook,” Mwenda told IPS in an interview.

The 24th Conference of the Parties (COP 24) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to be held in Katowice, Poland in December, is earmarked as the deadline for the finalisation of the Paris Agreement operational guidelines.

But there are concerns from the African group that there is a deliberate attempt by developed parties to derail the process as the operationalisation of the agreement implies a financial obligation for them to support the adaptation and mitigation action of developing countries.

Since 2015 when the Paris Agreement was reached, the world has seen a shift in the geopolitical landscape, ushering in a climate-sceptic Donald Trump as president of the United States, and several far-right wing nationalist movements gaining power in Europe.

“Two strong groups have joined forces on this issue – the extractive industry, and right-wing nationalists. The combination has taken the current debate to a much more dramatic level than previously, at the same time as our window of opportunity is disappearing,” said Martin Hultman, associate professor in Science, Technology and Environmental studies at Chalmers University of Technology and research leader for the comprehensive project titled ‘Why don’t we take climate change seriously? A study of climate change denial’.

For his part, Trump made good on his campaign promise when he wrote to the UNFCCC secretariat, notifying them of his administration’s intention to withdraw the United States from the treaty, thereby undermining the universality of the Paris Agreement and impairing states’ confidence in climate cooperation.

With this scenario in mind, the discussions at the recently-concluded climate conference in Africa were largely dominated by how the continent could harness homegrown solutions and standing united in the face of shifting climate political dynamics.

In his opening remarks, which he delivered on behalf of Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta, Kenya’s environment and forestry minister, Keriako Tobiko said climate change was a matter of life and death for Africa.

And this was the reason why leaders needed to speak with a strong unified voice.

“We have all experienced the devastating and unprecedented impacts of climate change on our peoples’ lives and livelihoods as well as our national economies. Africa is the most vulnerable continent despite contributing only about four percent to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but when we go to argue our case we speak in tongues and come back with no deal,” he said.

He said given Africa’s shared ecosystems, it was essential to speak in one voice to safeguard the basis of the continent’s development and seek transformative solutions.

This climate conference was held just days after the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report on Global Warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius which warned of a catastrophe if immediate action is not taken to halt GHG emissions.

And commenting on the IPCC report, Tobiko reiterated the resolutions of the first Africa Environment Partnership Platform held from Sept. 20 to, under the auspices of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, the technical body of the African Union, which emphasised the need to turn environmental challenges into economic solutions through innovation and green investments.

Tobiko said that Kenya would be hosting the first Sustainable Blue Economy Conference from Nov. 26 to 28 to promote sustainable investments in oceans, seas, lakes, and rivers.

Just like the Africa Environment Partnership Platform — which recognised “indigenous knowledge and customary governance systems as part of Africa’s rich heritage in addressing environmental issues” — indigenisation was also a trending topic at the CCDA VII.

Under the theme: ‘Policies and actions for effective implementation of the Paris Agreement for resilient economies in Africa’, the conference attracted over 700 participants from member states, climate researchers, academia, civil society organisations and local government leaders, among others.
Experts said that local communities, women and the youth should be engaged in Africa’s efforts to combat the vagaries of climate change.

James Murombedzi, officer-in-charge of the Africa Climate Policy Centre of the U.N. Commission for Africa, said African communities have long practiced many adaptation strategies and viable responses to the changing climate.

However, he said, “there are limits to how well communities can continue to practice adaptive livelihoods in the context of a changing climate”, adding that it was time they were supported by an enabling environment created by government-planned adaptation.

“That is why at CCDA-VII we believe that countries have to start planning for a warmer climate than previously expected so this means we need to review all the different climate actions and proposals to ensure that we can in fact not only survive in a 3 degrees Celsius warmer environment but still be able to meet our sustainable development objectives and our Agenda 2063,” added Murombedzi.

Murombedzi said it was sad that most African governments had continued spending huge sums of money on unplanned adaptations for climate-related disasters.

And these, according Yacob Mulugetta, professor of Energy and Development Policy, University London College, “are the implications of global warming for Africa which is already experiencing massive climate impacts, such as crop production, tourism industries and hydropower generation.”

Mulugetta, one of the lead authors of the IPCC special report, however, noted that “international cooperation is a critical part of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees,” but warned African climate experts to take cognisance of the shifting global geopolitical landscape, which he said is having a significant bearing on climate negotiations.

Meanwhile, the African Development Bank (AfDB), pledged continued support to a climate-resilient development transition in Africa through responsive policies, plans and programmes focusing on building transformed economies and healthy ecosystems.

James Kinyangi of the AfDB said the Bank’s Climate Action Plan for the period 2016 to 2020 was ambitious, as it “explores modalities for achieving adaptation, the adequacy and effectiveness of climate finance, capacity building and technology transfer – all aimed at building skills so that African economies can realise their full potential for adaptation in high technology sectors.”

Under this plan, the bank will nearly triple its annual climate financing to reach USD5 billion a year by 2020.

From left, Anthony Nyong, Director of Climate Change and Green Growth at AfDB, Hyoeun Jenny Kim, Deputy Director General of GGGI, Fisiha Abera, Director General of the International Financial Institutions Cooperation (Ethiopia). Credit: Ahn Miyoung/IPS

By Ahn Mi Young
BUSAN, May 26 2018 (IPS)

The Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) presented the African model of a National Financing Vehicle in which the governments of Rwanda and Ethiopia have successfully promoted green growth and climate resilience, at an event May 25 on the sidelines of the annual meetings of the Board of Governors of the African Development Bank (AfDB) in Busan, South Korea.

GGGI and AfDB signed a partnership to accelerate Africa’s inclusive and sustainable green growth.

“We will focus on Africa, as we are seeing a huge potential in Africa,” Hyoeun Jenny Kim, deputy director general of GGGI, said in her opening remarks.

“So far, we’ve worked very closely and very extensively with Ethiopia and Rwanda throughout the comprehensive stages of designing and developing projects as well as mobilizing funds,” she told IPS after the side event.

“We’ve so far worked only with a small number of countries… But these climate funding success stories in Rwanda and Ethiopia encouraged us to extend our reach to other Africa countries like Senegal, Uganda or Mozambique,” she added.

After a two-year stint as ambassador to Senegal, Kim, who previously worked at the OECD, joined GGGI in May as its new deputy director general, in charge of planning and implementation of 33 projects in 25 countries.

She emphasized the need for adopting locally relevant green growth paths in Africa, as well as mobilizing funds. “When I was working at OECD, I was seeing the agenda from a global perspective. [While in Senegal as a Korean ambassador], I have seen the unique and particular reality facing each African country. So I understand the need to adapt our climate resilience and green growth initiatives to fit the particular condition of each African country.”

The side event highlighted how Rwanda and Ethiopia have used public investment funding to bring aboard private sector investment with close cooperation with GGGI.

Hubert Ruzibiza, CEO of Rwanda’s Green Fund, revealed how Rwanda has successfully financed green growth and climate resilience through its National Fund for Environment and Climate Change (FONERWA), whose function is to identify and invest in the best public and private projects that have the potential for transformative change that aligns with Rwanda’s commitment to building a strong green economy.

The fund has created about 137,000 green jobs, rehabilitated 19,304 area (ha) of land against erosion, and made about 28,000 families connected to off-grid clean energy.

“FONERWA has a global track record as the national financing mechanism by bringing together public and private sector investment,” Ruzibiza noted.

The side event also highlighted the GGGI-Ethiopia partnership to design, develop and implement Ethiopia’s political commitment to CRGE (Climate Resilience Green Economy), as well as its national financing mechanism called the Ethiopia CRGE Facility, which is the country’s primary financial instrument to mobilize, access and combine domestic and international, public and private sources of finance to support the institutional building and implementation of the CRGE Strategy.

“As we are raising the green growth and climate resilient funding, especially from small and medium-sized business that constitutes about 90 percent of our business, so are the number of projects increasing,” said Fisiha Abera, Director General of the International Financial Institutions Cooperation in Ethiopia.

GGGI has been working closely with the government of Ethiopia since 2010 to omplement its CRGE strategy. GGGI supported CRGE to mobilize a 60-million-dollar grant from the Adaptation Fund (AF) and the Green Climate Fund (GCF), as well as another 75 million in climate finance. Most recently, GGGI helped mobilize 300 million dollars from the international private sector for the Mekele Water Supply Project.

“The CRGE model shows the importance of the government’s political commitment in which the government takes a holistic national approach. So our advisers are working closely with a wide variety of government functions,” said Kim.

The AfDB and GGGI signed an MOU on the sidelines of the African Development Bank Group’s Annual Meetings in Busan to promote programs, conduct joint studies and research activities to accelerate green growth options for African countries, as well as to work together in the GGGI’s cities programs and the AfDB’s initiatives on clean energy, sustainable landscapes, green cities, water and sanitation, with the ultimate goal of strengthening climate resilience in Africa.

The MOU was signed by Kim of GGI and Amadou Hott, Vice-President, Power, Energy, Climate and Green Growth, AfDB.

Ban Ki-moon, who previously served as the eighth Secretary General of the United Nations, took office as President of the Assembly and Chairman of the council of GGGI on March 27.

Headquartered in the heart of Seoul, GGGI has 28 member states and employs staff from more than 40 countries. Its areas of focus include green cities, water and sanitation, sustainable landscapes, sustainable energy and cross-cutting strategies for financing mechanisms.

AFDB is Africa’s premier development finance institution. It comprises three distinct entities: the AfDB, the African Development Fund and Nigeria Trust Fund NTF. Working on the ground in 44 African countries with an external office in Japan, the AfDB contributes to the economic development and the social progress of its 54 regional member states.

St. Vincent and the Grenadines has installed 750 kilowatt hours of photovoltaic panels, which it says reduced its carbon emissions by 800 tonnes annually. Credit: Kenton X. Chance/IPS

By Friday Phiri
PEMBA, Zambia, May 23 2018 (IPS)

Climate finance has never been more urgently needed, with massive investments in climate action required to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement and avoid the devastating effects of a warmer planet.

However, it is an open secret that public financing mechanisms alone are not enough to meet the demand for climate finance, especially for developing countries whose cost to implement their conditional Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and transition to low-carbon economies is pegged at 4.3 trillion dollars.Scaling up and accelerating innovative approaches to climate finance from multiple sources, including the private sector, has emerged as a key strategy to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.

This is a huge price-tag when compared to the Green Climate Fund (GCF’s) current coffers, which are still being counted in billion terms. The GCF is one of the designated UNFCCC financial instruments created at COP 17 in Durban, South Africa.

Therefore, scaling up and accelerating innovative approaches to climate finance from multiple sources, including the private sector, has emerged as a key strategy to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement through long-term and predictable climate-smart investments.

It is for this reason that the World Bank and partners has been organising platforms in which ways of leveraging public resources with private sector financing are discussed.

One such platform is the Innovate4Climate, launched in 2017 in Barcelona. It serves as an integral part of the global dialogue on climate finance, sustainable development, carbon pricing and markets.

This year’s event, set for Frankfurt from 22-24 May, with four thematic areas, convenes global leaders from industry, government and multilateral agencies for a one-day Summit, workshops and a Marketplace, to work and dialogue on development of innovative financing instruments and approaches to support low-carbon, climate-resilient development pathways.

The Business Case for Climate Investment

Under this pillar, the focus is on the important role of the private sector to fight climate change. It explores climate-related business opportunities such as how to create markets for climate investments, and which approaches are effective in de-risking investment opportunities.

At the meeting, this stream is set to showcase sustainability and climate-resilient initiatives of business associations and industries, present models of collaboration and partnerships between public and private sector, as well as analyse trends and new initiatives in mobilizing development/climate finance, to match developing country investment needs with private sector capital.

A classic example under this theme is the GCF blended model—the use of four financial instruments: concessional loans, equity, grants, and guarantees that can be used through different modalities and at various stages of the financing cycle. Debt and equity instruments help close a specific financing gap for specific projects and programmes, thus bringing more projects and programmes to fruition, while guarantees help to crowd in new private sector financing from multilateral development banks, national development banks, and others.

“We are starting to see it already with the GCF,” says Fenella Aouane, Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI’s) Principal Climate Finance Specialist. “They put out the 500-million-dollar private sector facility…they have gone into the market for the entirety of the private sector globally, they put out a call for proposals to spend up to 500 million. Now relate that to the fact that in a single board meeting in February, they approved projects worth 1 billion.”

NDC Implementation—policies and finance

Another central theme of the Innovate4Climate conference this year is focusing on improving access to finance and support for capacity building to successfully implement countries’ NDCs. This stream targets initiatives aiming at getting “further-faster-together” for NDCs implementation.

The key questions revolve around how to improve access to available funding and mobilize new sources, to strengthen climate finance readiness and accelerate disbursement of climate finance, how to increase and sustain ambitions, and ensure accountability and how to reduce transaction costs through standardisation and simplifying processes.

Innovation for Climate Resilience

Technology is a crucial component of the Paris Agreement’s means of implementation pillar. There is no question that innovative technologies and financial instruments are changing the narrative of climate change resilience. Thus, this stream presents achievements and models in climate smart agriculture, climate action in cities, and disaster risk management among others.

And in relation to the theme of technology, Tony Simon, Director General of the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), recently emphasised the importance of adopting locally-relevant options that enhance agricultural productivity, for example, in relation to climate change adaptation and mitigation through exploring innovative finance instruments.

“Explore innovative finance instruments,” said Simon at the UNFCCC organized first regional Talanoa which was part of the Africa Climate Week, held in Nairobi in April 2018. “Private equity offers a huge amount of money. Use the money from CTCN and other sources to pull in other funds and use that as an opportunity to blend financing for climate change initiatives.”

Climate Market and Metrics

Under this theme, the focus is on the contribution of market-based approaches to efficient and cost-effective climate change mitigation. Delegates will discuss current and future trends around practical outcomes of international negotiations on Article 6 (voluntary cooperation on mitigation and adaptation actions). The theme also seeks to understand what can be expected from aviation and shipping.

“One area where forestry hopes the private sector may be interested is—the airline industry is currently trying to decide how it will offset its emissions as an industry and one way that might do this is through the purchase of carbon offsetting assets so that could be forestry in the form of some level of carbon credit,” GGGI’s Fenella told IPS. “If they do this, then there will be a possible clear return for investors.”

While the Innovate4Climate conference gets underway in Frankfurt next week, it seems the private sector approach by GGGI is already paying dividends. According to its 2017 Annual report, GGGI helped mobilize over half a billion dollars for green investments that aim to support developing countries and emerging economies transition toward environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive economic growth.

It contributed to the mobilization of 524.6 million dollars in green investments in Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Rwanda and other countries in which the Seoul-based international organization operates.

“This is a record achievement for GGGI, representing more than 11 times the organization’s actual budget in 2017,” said Dr. Frank Rijsberman, GGGI Director-General. “Working closely with partner countries over the years to develop and implement policies that enable the environment to for green growth investment, GGGI is now demonstrating its growing capacity to access and mobilize finance for projects that deliver strong impact.”

With GGGI technical support to design and de-risk bankable projects, of the total amount mobilized, 412 million came from the private sector.

And just to highlight some countries in Africa, in Ethiopia, GGGI produced a pipeline of projects for the Mekelle City Water Project that helped attract 337 million dollars from the international private sector, while in Rwanda, GGGI catalyzed a 60-million investment from the private sector for a Cactus Green Park Development Project in Kigali, to support Rwanda’s secondary cities program.

Role of Multilateral Banks

The discussion on green economic growth and the increasing need for private sector climate financing cannot be complete without mentioning the role of multilateral banks. According to the World Bank, concessional climate finance is one critical strategy under this pillar, to support developing countries to build resilience to worsening climate impacts and to catalyzing private sector climate investment. Through this approach, collectively, the Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) increased their climate financing in developing countries and emerging economies to 27.4 billion dollars in 2016 – including more than 11 billion from the WBG.

From an African perspective, the African Development Bank (AfDB) has been instrumental to the green growth discourse and the need for African countries not to follow the fossil fuel development pathway.

And in its efforts to foster a green growth economic pathway, in 2014, the AfDB released the first-ever Green Growth Framework—to function as a foundational reference document for its work on green growth. The bank was therefore instrumental in the formulation of Africa Renewable Energy Initiative (AREI).

The initiative, which came out of COP21 and subsequently approved by the African Union, aims at delivering 300GW of renewable energy by 2030.

The AfDB also played a key role in de-risking one of Africa’s gigantic multi-billion-dollar solar power investment in Ouarzazate, Morocco, an example of a green growth economic model, which requires multi-million-dollar investments that cannot be done by public financing alone.

Mustapha Bakkaoury, president of the Moroccan Agency for Solar Energy (MASEN), told delegates at COP 22 that his country’s renewable energy revolution would not have been possible if multilateral partners such as the AfDB had not come on board to act as a guarantor for financing of the project.

About the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI)

Based in Seoul, GGGI is an intergovernmental organization that supports developing country governments transition to a model of economic growth that is environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive.

GGGI delivers programs in 27 partner countries with technical support, capacity building, policy planning & implementation, and by helping to build a pipeline of bankable green investment projects.

More on GGGI’s events, projects and publications can be found on www.gggi.org.

Bags of feed at the Rossgro agribusiness firm in South Africa. Credit: Friday Phiri/IPS

By Friday Phiri
MPUMALANGA, South Africa, Jul 6 2017 (IPS)

The United States and Europe’s preference for white meat is hurting Africa’s poultry industry, says Luc Smalle, manager at the agro firm Rossgro in South Africa’s Mpumalanga area.

With 3000 Ha of maize and 1000 Ha of soya, as well as 1,500 heads of beef cattle, Rossgro mills its own feed, which also caters for millions of chickens housed in 40 environmentally controlled houses.Africa’s young, dynamic population has the potential to lead an economic revival in the region, backed by targeted long- and short-term reforms in key areas.

But Smalle is uncertain about the future of the poultry business, not only in South Africa but the whole continent.

He recalled how the US and Europe exported millions of tonnes of chicken meat to the then Soviet Union (now Russia). Historically, Russia was the major importer of America’s dark meat. According to available data, in 2009 alone, Russia is said to have doled out 800 million dollars for 1.6 billion pounds of U.S. leg quarters.

But in 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin banned U.S. chicken from Russian shores, allegedly because it was treated with ‘unsafe’ antimicrobial chlorine. The ban remains in place, although some say it’s more about politics than public health.

Either way, according to Smalle, the ban “has led America and Europe to look for alternative markets to dump brown meat because most of the First World eats white meat, so they are dumping chicken in the third world, especially Africa. We should stand together and work with our governments to stop imports or put high tariffs so that they can’t dump it anymore.”

In a chicken, white meat refers to the breast and wings while legs and thighs are considered red/dark meat. The nutritional difference is fat content. White meat is a leaner source of protein, with a lower fat content, while dark meat contains higher levels of fat, hence the developed world preference for white meat on health grounds.

Smalle believes this state of affairs is hurting African poultry industry competitiveness where the average cost of raising a chicken is far much higher than in the developed world. He says most African farmers rely on bank loans from banks while their European and American counterparts are heavily subsidised by their governments.

“It’s going to kill the whole poultry industry in Africa if nothing is done to reverse the trend; they have subsidies which the African farmer does not have,” Smalle told IPS, citing the South African poultry industry, where he says a third of the workers have lost their jobs because firms have been pushed out of business.

Under free market economics, Smalle’s arguments might seem out of order. But the latest Africa Competitiveness Report 2017 jointly issued by the African Development Bank, World Bank and World Economic Forum seems to support the continent’s argument.

The report warns that without urgent action to address stagnating levels of competitiveness, Africa’s economies will not create enough jobs for young people entering the job market, adding that if current policies remain unchanged, fewer than one-quarter of the 450 million new jobs needed in the next 20 years will be created.

The biennial report comes at a time when growth in most of the region’s economies has been slowing despite a decade of sustained growth, and is likely to stagnate further in the absence of improvements in the core conditions for competitiveness.

Compounding the challenge to Africa’s leaders is a rapidly expanding population, which is set to add 450 million more to the labour force over the next two decades. Under current policies, only an estimated 100 million jobs will be created during this period.

Africa’s young, dynamic population does, however, possess the potential to lead an economic revival in the region, backed by targeted long- and short-term reforms in key areas, the report finds.

“To meet the aspirations of their growing youth populations, African governments are well-advised to enact polices that improve levels of productivity and the business environment for trade and investment,” says the World Bank Group’s Klaus Tilmes, Director of the Trade & Competitiveness Global Practice, which contributed to the report.

“The World Bank Group is helping governments and the private sector across Africa to take the steps necessary to build strong economies and accelerate job creation in order to benefit from the potential demographic dividend.”

Some of the bottlenecks and solutions include strengthening institutions, which experts believe is a pre-condition to enable faster and more effective policy implementation; improved infrastructure to enable greater levels of trade and business growth; greater adoption of technology and support to developing value-chain links to extractive sectors to encourage diversification and value addition.

The World Economic Forum’s Richard Samans, Head of the Centre for the Global Agenda and Member of the Managing Board, believes that “removing the hurdles that prevent Africa from fulfilling its competitiveness potential is the first step required to achieve more sustained economic progress and shared prosperity.”

The Africa Competitiveness report was released in May during the 27th World Economic Forum on Africa in Durban, South Africa, attended by more than 1,000 participants under the theme “Achieving Inclusive Growth through Responsive and Responsible Leadership.”

The report combines data from the Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index (GCI) with studies on employment policies and city competitiveness.

A panel discussion on Africa-Asia partnerships featuring AFDB Group President Akinwumi Adesina, Benin President Patrice Talon, Vice President of Cote d'Ivoire Daniel Kablan Duncan and Hellen Hai of Made in Africa Initiative. Credit: Friday Phiri/IPS

By Friday Phiri
AHMEDABAD, India, May 29 2017 (IPS)

There are nearly 420 million young Africans between the ages of 15 and 35 today. And it is estimated that within ten years, Africa will be home to one-fifth of all young people worldwide.

These millions of young people could be a source of ingenuity and engines of productivity that could ignite a new age of inclusive prosperity.“If we don’t change the labour composition of agriculture in Africa, in the next twenty years, there will be no farmers.” --AfDB President Akinwumi Adesina

But there are no guarantees. Although the continent has shown consistent economic growth in the last decade, it has failed in creating the number of quality jobs needed to absorb the 10-12 million young people entering the labour market each year.

And this, according to AfDB Vice President for Agriculture, Human and Social Development, Jennifer Blanke, is a time bomb waiting to explode.

“While the youth population is Africa’s asset, it can also easily become a liability, and this is the whole question about demographic dividends,” observes Blanke. “Let us be clear, it is only the existence of opportunity and the young person’s belief that they can access that opportunity that prevents pessimism and political unrest…inaction is not an option, young people without opportunity, and more importantly without belief in their leaders’ ability to provide opportunity are a certain source of civil unrest and we are seeing it every day.”

‘Transforming Agriculture for wealth creation in Africa’ was therefore the major theme of the 52^nd AfDB Annual Meetings held in Ahmedabad, India from 22-26 May 2017.

Experts here agreed that transforming Africa’s agriculture requires a business approach that would incentivize youth who still see farming as way of life for the poor. As a result of this scenario, the average age of farmers in Africa is 60, and Akinwumi Adesina, AfDB Group President, fears that “If we don’t change the labour composition of agriculture in Africa, in the next twenty years, there will be no farmers.”

To get youth involved, Adesina believes, “We need to change the mindset about agriculture—agriculture is not a social sector, agriculture is not a way of life, it is a business.”

But the how question is crucial, and he points to finance among other incentives. “There are opportunities for youth but certain things have to be put in place to realize them, such as financing…our young people are doing amazing things with ICT—they are providing weather index insurance, extension services and a host of other things.”

For its part, the Bank has provided a roadmap for the growth of agriculture in Africa with a plan to inject nearly 2.4 billion dollars every year for 10 years to build roads, irrigation infrastructure and storage facilities to attract high-value investors.

With this kind of investment, AfDB wants to transform Agriculture into a money-making business for those involved, highlighting that Africa should position itself to benefit from the growth of agricultural food markets which are set to grow to a trillion-dollar business portfolio by 2030.

The figure is huge and appetising. But certain steps have to be taken, and one of those steps is closing the infrastructure gap.

According to Thomas Silberhorn, Germany Parliamentary State Secretary, “It is important to close the infrastructure gap on the African continent, not just somehow, but in the spirit of the 2030 agenda for sustainable development, by building sustainable infrastructure especially in the energy sector,” he said, adding that it was for this reason that his government was advocating for more support to the African Renewable Initiative of the African Union whose secretariat is hosted at the African Development Bank.

While ICT is usually seen as a sure way of getting youth involved, there is another door to young people’s hearts which agricultural policy makers and implementers have not paid attention to—the film industry.  In Africa, the movie industry is dominated by young people and is emerging as an important contributor to gross domestic product and employment in countries like Nigeria.

However, the entertainment industry–especially the film industry—too often offers unflattering narratives of agriculture and the rural life, showing that real economic opportunities are only found in big cities. Such negative portrayal perpetuates the perception that agriculture is simply a way of surviving for the poor.

To tap into the power and influence of the movie industry, and change these perceptions by projecting agriculture as a profitable and viable economic sector, AfDB brought together Nollywood (Nigerian) and Bollywood (Indian) film makers to this year’s annual meetings to chart the way forward on how to market agriculture as a lucrative business through movies.

Nigerian filmmakers Omoni Oboli and Omotola Jalade Ekeinde represented Nollywood while Rajendrakumar Mohan Raney, a director and producer, and Rekha Rana, Indian and international award-winning actress, represented Bollywood.

Oboli and Omotola pledged to do everything in their power to tell the African agricultural transformation story and change the negative perceptions, especially among young people.

“We have learnt a lot about agriculture and are ready to change the state of affairs through filmmaking,” said Oboli during the Indian Cultural Night and AfDB Impact Awards ceremony where she was a guest presenter alongside BBC’s Lerato Mbele.

As Adesina noted, with 65 percent of the world’s uncultivated land, “What Africa does with agriculture is not only important for Africa: it will shape the future of food in the world.”

AfDB President Akinwumi Adesina adressing delegates at the nutrition event while Ambassador Kenneth Quinn, World Food Prize Foundation, listens. Credit: Friday Phiri/IPS

By Friday Phiri
AHMEDABAD, India, May 24 2017 (IPS)

Developing Africa’s ‘grey matter infrastructure’ through multi-sector investments in nutrition has been identified as a game changer for Africa’s sustainable development.

Experts here at the 2017 African Development Bank’s Annual Meetings say investing in physical infrastructure alone cannot help Africa to move forward without building brainpower.“We can’t say Africa is rising when half of our children are stunted.” --Muhammad Ali Pate

“We can repair a bridge, we know how to do that, we can fix a port, we know how to do it, we can fix a rail, we know how to do that, but we don’t know how to fix brain cells once they are gone, that’s why we need to change our approach to dealing with nutrition matters in Africa,” said AfDB President, Akinwumi Adesina, pointing out that stunting alone costs Africa 25 billion dollars annually.

Malnutrition – the cause of half of child deaths worldwide – continues to rob generations of Africans of the chance to grow to their full physical and cognitive potential, hugely impacting not only health outcomes, but also economic development.

Malnutrition is unacceptably high on the continent, with 58 million or 36 percent of children under the age of five chronically undernourished (suffering from stunting)—and in some countries, as many as one out of every two children suffer from stunting. The effects of stunting are irreversible, impacting the ability of children’s bodies and brains to grow to their full potential.

On a panel discussion Developing Africa’s Grey Matter Infrastructure: Addressing Africa’s Nutrition Challenges” moderated by IFPRI’s Rajul Pandya-Lorch, experts highlighted the importance of urgently fighting the scourge of malnutrition.

Laura Landis of the World Food Programme (WFP) said the cost of inaction is dramatic. “We have to make an economic argument on why we need action,” she said. “The WFP is helping, in cooperation with the African Union and the AfDB, to collect the data that gets not just the Health Minister moving, but also Heads of State or Ministers of Finance.”

The idea is to get everyone involved and not leave nutrition to agriculture and/or health ministries alone. And panelists established that there is indeed a direct link between productivity and growth of the agriculture sector and improved nutrition.

Baffour Agyeman of the John Kuffuor Foundation puts it simply: “It has become evident that it is the quality of food and not the quantity thereof that is more important,” calling for awareness not to end at high level conferences but get to the grassroots.

Assisting African governments to build strong and robust economies is accordingly a key priority for the AfDB. But recognizing the potential that exists in the continent’s vast human capital, the bank included nutrition as a focus area under its five operational priorities – the High 5s.

And to mobilise support at the highest level, the African Leaders for Nutrition (ALN) initiative was launched last year, bringing together Heads of State committed to ending malnutrition in their countries.

As a key partner of this initiative, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation foresees improved accountability with such an initiative in place. “ALN is a way to make the fight against malnutrition a central development issue that Ministers of Finance and Heads of State take seriously and hold all sectors accountable for,” said Shawn Baker, Nutrition Director at the Foundation.

However, African Ministers of Finance want to see better coordination and for governments to play a leading role in such initiatives to achieve desired results. “Cooperation and coordination are key between government and development partners,” said Sierra Leone’s Finance and Economic Development Minister Momodu Kargbo. “Development partners disregard government systems when implementing programmes whereas they should align and carefully regard existing government institutions and ways of working.”

Notwithstanding the overarching theme of Africa rising, Muhammad Ali Pate, CEO of Big Win Philanthropy, says, “We can’t say Africa is rising when half of our children are stunted.” He pointed out the need to close the mismatch between the continent’s sustained GDP growth and improved livelihood of its people.

With the agreed global SDG agenda, Gerda Verburg, Scaling Up Nutrition Movement Coordinator sees nutrition as a core of achieving the goals. “Without better nutrition you will not end poverty, without better nutrition you will not end gender inequality, without better nutrition you will not improve health, find innovative approaches, or peace and stability, better nutrition is the core,” she says.

Therefore, developing Grey Matter Infrastructure is key to improving the quality of life for the people of Africa. But it won’t happen without leadership to encourage investments in agriculture and nutrition, and more importantly, resource mobilization for this purpose.

Djibouti Port. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

By Akinwumi Adesina
ABIDJAN, Côte d'Ivoire, May 19 2017 (IPS)

Africa, like India, is a continent of rich and compelling diversity. Both continents share a similar landscape, a shared colonial history, and similar economic and demographic challenges. This helps both India and Africa work especially well with each other.

This cooperation is both a mutual privilege and priority. At the end of the 2015 India-Africa Forum Summit, Indian Prime Minister Modi announced very substantial credits and grant assistance which benefitted our relationship. In addition to an India-Africa Development Fund, an India-Africa Health Fund and 50,000 scholarships for African students in India were established.

India’s bilateral trade with Africa has risen five-fold in the last decade, from $11.9 billion in 2005-6 to $56.7 billion in 2015-16. It is expected to reach $100 billion by 2018. This is attributed largely to initiatives by India’s private sector, and here again we are on the same wave length. We understand and appreciate that the private sector will be the critical element in Africa’s transformation.

African countries are targeted by Indian investors due to their high-growth markets and mineral rich reserves. India is the fifth largest country investing in Africa, with investments over the past 20 years amounting to $54 billion, 19.2% of all its total Foreign Direct Investment.

Akinwumi Adesina

At the same time a transformed Africa is taking shape. Despite a tough global economic environment, African countries continue to be resilient. Their economies, on average, grew by 2.2% in 2016, and are expected to rise to 3.4% this year. But the average does not tell the true picture. Indeed, 14 African countries grew by over 5% in 2016 and 18 countries grew between 3-5%. That’s a remarkable performance in a period when the global environment has been impeded by recession.

By 2050, Africa will have roughly the same population as China and India combined today, with high consumer demand from a growing middle class and nearly a billion ambitious and hard-working young people. The cities will be booming, as the populations (and economic expectations) rise exponentially around the continent.

This is the busy and bustling future that Africa and India must shape together in a strategic partnership. And nowhere is this partnership more needed than on the issue of infrastructure.

At the top of the list is power and electricity. Some 645 million Africans do not have access to electricity. It’s why the African Development Bank launched the New Deal on Energy for Africa in 2016. Our goal is to help achieve universal access to electricity within ten years. We will invest $12 billion in the energy sector over the next five years and leverage $45-50 billion from the private sector. We plan to connect 130 million people to the grid system, 75 million people through off grid systems and provide 150 million people with access to clean cooking energy.

India’s bilateral trade with Africa has risen five-fold in the last decade, from $11.9 billion in 2005-6 to $56.7 billion in 2015-16. It is expected to reach $100 billion by 2018.
The African Development Bank is also in the vanguard of renewable energy development and the remarkable “off-grid revolution” in Africa. We host the Africa Renewable Energy Initiative, jointly developed with the African Union, which has already attracted $10 billion in investment commitments from G7 countries.

Universal access requires large financial investments. By some estimates, Africa needs $43-$55 billion per year until the 2030s, compared to current energy investments of about $8-$9.2 billion.

We must close this gap. And to do so, the mobilization of domestic resources will play a major role. Pension funds in Africa will reach $1.3 trillion by 2025. Already tax revenues have exceeded $500 billion per year. Sovereign wealth funds in Africa stand at $164 billion.

To attract significant investment by institutional investors, infrastructure should become an asset class. The African Development Bank has launched Africa50, a new infrastructure entity, now capitalized by African countries at over $865 million, to help accelerate infrastructure project development and project finance. Also, later this year, the African Development Bank will be launching the ‘Africa Investment Forum’ to leverage African and global pension and sovereign wealth funds into investments in Africa.

Moreover, the African business environment keeps improving, with easier regulations and more conducive government policies to attract the global investors. In 2015, Africa alone accounted for more than 30% of the business regulatory reforms in the world.

The fact is, we have already started to transform Africa. This is the territory of the High 5s: Light up and Power Africa; Feed Africa; Industrialize Africa; Integrate Africa; and Improve the Quality of life of Africans.

We can forge winning partnerships investing in power generation, energy, agro-aligned industrialisation and food processing. In doing so we can work on the synergies that exist between infrastructure, regional integration, the regulation of enterprises, employment, health and innovation.

In each of these areas I see the prospect for cooperation and collaboration with Indian partners. For example, we are partnering with the EXIM Bank of India and others to establish the Kukuza, a company based in Mauritius, to help develop and support public-private partnership (PPP) infrastructure project development and finance.

India is already one of the top bidders for Bank projects. This is a reflection of its immense expertise in a diverse range of areas from engineering to education; from ICT to railway development; skills development to regional integration; and from manufacturing to industrialisation.

It is our pleasure to partner with such an inveterate and committed investor in Africa. And may this investment be lucrative and justified, and may our mutual interest and cooperation continue for many years to come.

Dr Akinwumi Adesina is President of the African Development Bank. The 2017 AfDB Annual Meetings will be held in Ahmedabad, India, 22-26 May.

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Rice fields in Northern Ghana. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Akinwumi Adesina
ABIDJAN, Côte d'Ivoire, May 12 2017 (IPS)

No region of the world has ever moved to industrialised economy status without a transformation of the agricultural sector. Agriculture, which contributes 16.2% of the GDP of Africa, and gives some form of employment to over 60% of the population, holds the key to accelerated growth, diversification and job creation for African economies.

But the performance of the sector has historically been low. Cereal yields are significantly below the global average. Modern farm inputs, including improved seeds, mechanisation and irrigation, are severely limited.

In the past, agriculture was seen as the domain of the humanitarian development sector, as a way to manage poverty. It was not seen as a business sector for wealth creation. Yet Africa has huge potential in agriculture – and with it huge investment potential. Some 65% of all the uncultivated arable land left in the world lies in Africa. When Africa manages to feed itself, as – within a generation – it will, it will also be able to to feed the 9 billion people who will inhabit the planet in 2050.

However, Africa is wasting vast amounts of money and resources by underrating its agriculture sector. For example, it spends $35 billion in foreign currency annually importing food, a figure that is set to rise to over $100 billion per year by 2030.

Akinwumi Adesina

In so doing, Africa is choking its own economic future. It is importing the food that it should be growing itself. It is exporting, often to developed countries, the jobs it needs to keep and nurture. It also has to pay inflated prices resulting from global commodity supply fluctuations.

The food and agribusiness sector is projected to grow from $330 billion today to $1 trillion by 2030, and remember that there will also be 2 billion people looking for food and clothing. African enterprises and investors need to convert this opportunity and unlock this potential for Africa and Africans.

Africa must start by treating agriculture as a business. It must learn fast from experiences elsewhere, for example in south east Asia, where agriculture has been the foundation for fast-paced economic growth, built on a strong food processing and agro-industrial manufacturing base.

This is the transformation formula: agriculture allied with industry, manufacturing and processing capability equals strong and sustainable economic development, which creates wealth throughout the economy.

Africa must not miss opportunities for such linkages whenever and wherever they occur. We must reduce food system losses all along the food chain, from the farm, storage, transport, processing and retail marketing.

To drive agro-industrialization, we must be able to finance the sector. Doing so will help unlock the potential of agriculture as a business on the continent. Under its Feed Africa strategy, the African Development Bank will invest $24 billion in agriculture and agribusiness over the next ten years. This is a 400% increase in financing, from the current levels of $600 million per year.

A key component will be providing $700 million to a flagship program known as “Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation” for the scaling up of agricultural technologies to reach millions of farmers in Africa in the next ten years.

This is the transformation formula: agriculture allied with industry, manufacturing and processing capability equals strong and sustainable economic development, which creates wealth throughout the economy.
Finance and farming have not always been easy partners in Africa. Another pillar of the Bank’s strategy is to accelerate commercial financing for agriculture. Despite its importance, the agriculture sector receives less than 3% of the overall industry financing provided by the banking sector.

Risk sharing instruments may resolve this, by sharing the risk of lending by commercial banks to the agriculture sector. Development finance institutions and multilateral development banks should be setting up national risk-sharing facilities in every African country to leverage agricultural finance. And the African Development Bank is setting the pace based on a very successful risk sharing scheme that I promoted while Agriculture Minister in Nigeria.

Rural infrastructure development is critical for the transformation of the agriculture sector, including electricity, water, roads and rail to transport finished agricultural and processed foods.

The lack of this infrastructure drives up the cost of doing business and has discouraged food manufacturing companies from getting established in rural areas. Governments should provide fiscal and infrastructure incentives for food manufacturing companies to move into rural areas, closer to zones of production than consumption.

This can be achieved by developing agro-industrial zones and staple crop processing zones in rural areas. These zones, supported with consolidated infrastructure, including roads, water, electricity and perhaps suitable accommodation, will drive down the cost of doing business for private food and agribusiness firms.

They will create new markets for farmers, boosting economic opportunities in rural areas, stimulating jobs and attracting higher domestic and foreign investments into the rural areas. This will drive down the cost of doing business, as well as significantly reduce the high level of African post-harvest losses. As agricultural income rises, neglected rural areas will become zones of economic prosperity.

Our goal is simple: to support massive agro-industrial development all across Africa. When that happens, Africa will have taken its rightful place as a global powerhouse in food production. It could well also be feeding the world. At this point the economic transformation that we are all working for will be complete.

Dr Akinwumi Adesina is President of the African Development Bank. The 2017 AfDB Annual Meetings in Ahmedabad, India, 22-26 May, will focus on ‘Transforming agriculture for wealth creation in Africa’.

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Mustapha Bakkoury, President of the Moroccan Agency for Solar Energy (MASEN), speaking at the COP22 in Marrakesh. Credit: Friday Phiri/IPS

By Friday Phiri
MARRAKECH, Nov 16 2016 (IPS)

Lowering investment risks in African countries is key to achieving a climate-resilient development pathway on the continent, say experts here at the U.N.-sponsored Climate Conference.

Mustapha Bakkaoury, president of the Moroccan Agency for Solar Energy (MASEN), says his country’s renewable energy revolution would not have been possible if multilateral partners such as the African Development Bank had not come on board to act as guarantors for a massive solar energy project, tipped to be one of a kind in Africa.Renewable energy has been identified as a key driver for Africa’s economic growth prospects, but requires multi-million-dollar investments which cannot be done by public financing alone.

The multi-billion-dollar solar power complex, located in the Souss-Massa-Drâa area in Ouarzazate, is expected to produce 580 MW at peak when finished, and is hailed as a model for other African countries to follow.

“Africa has legitimate energy needs, and development of Africa will happen through mobilisation of energy resources,” Bakkaoury told IPS at COP 22 after a roundtable discussion on de-risking investment in realising groundbreaking renewable energy projects.

Bakkauory believes it is possible for Africa to develop its energy sector while respecting the environment. “What we say is that there is no fatality between having energy resources and respect towards the environment, and Africa has abundant resources to do this through its key partner—the African Development Bank,” he said, noting the instrumental role of Africa’s premier multilateral financier to renewable energy in Africa.

And in affirming its continued commitment to universal access to energy for Africa, Alex Rugamba, AfDB Director for Energy, Environment and Climate Change, told IPS that “the Bank’s commitment has shifted gear as it has now a fully-fledged vice presidency dedicated to Power, Energy, Climate and Green Growth.”

Rugamba added that the Bank has learnt valuable lessons from various initiatives it is already supporting, and knows what is required to move forward with the initiatives without many challenges.

Renewable energy has been identified as a key driver for Africa’s economic growth prospects, but requires multi-million-dollar investments which cannot be done by public financing alone.

Private sector involvement is required to drive this agenda, a point underscored by World Bank Vice President for Sustainable Development, Laura Tuck.

“Private sector cannot be ignored because the money they have is more than what is available under public financing,” she says.

But the risk is believed to be too high for private investors to off-load their money into Africa’s renewables, a relatively new investment portfolio with a lot of uncertainties. German Parliament State Secretary Thomas Silberhorn says the highest risk in Africa is politically related.

“It’s not about economic risks alone, but also political risks,” said Silberhorn. “You don’t need to convince German investors about solar energy because they already know that it works, what they need is reliability on the political environment and sustainability of their investments.”

Silberhorn, who gave an example of a multi-million-dollar project in Kenya currently on hold due to political interference, added that ways to reduce political risks should be devised for Africa to benefit from private sector investments in renewables.

But even as risk factors abound, World Bank’s Tuck believes there is hope for Africa, citing Zambia, where record cheap solar energy has been recorded.

“Through a competitive bidding process, we have in Zambia under the Bank’s ‘Scaling Solar’ program, recorded the cheapest price at 6.02 cents per KWh,” she said, heralding it as a model to follow in de-risking climate investments for Africa’s growth.

And in keeping with the objective of universal energy for all, experts note the need to ensure that the end users are not exploited at the expense of investors.

“While the state should not interfere in this business model to work, modalities have to be put in place to ensure that the people for which energy is needed, afford it, otherwise, the project becomes useless,” said MASEN’s Bakkaoury.

Following up on this key aspect and responding to the political risk question, Simon Ngure of KenGen Kenya proposes a key principle to minimise political interference—involvement of the local communities.

“If you involve the local communities from the onset, regardless of whether governments change, the projects succeed because the people will have seen the benefits already,” said Ngure, who also noted policy restructuring as another key component to de-risk climate investments.

Agreed that de-risking investment is a crucial component, small grants are another issue that the African Union Commission’s implementing Agency, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), believes could unlock the continent’s challenge of access to climate financing.

NEPAD Director of Programmes Estherine Fotabong told IPS that it was for this reason that the agency established the NEPAD Climate Change Fund to strengthen the resilience of African countries by building national, sub-regional and continental capacity.

“One of the objectives of the fund is to support concrete action for communities on the ground, but most importantly, to help with capacity building of member states to be able to leverage financing from complicated climate financial regimes,” said Fotabong, citing ECOWAS which she said used the funding to leverage financing from the Green Climate Fund, one of the financing regimes under the UNFCCC.

Albert Kanga's plantain farm on the outskirts of Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire. Credit: Friday Phiri/IPS

By Friday Phiri
ABIDJAN, Cote d'Ivoire, Jul 18 2016 (IPS)

Albert Kanga Azaguie no longer considers himself a smallholder farmer. By learning and monitoring the supply and demand value chains of one of the country’s staple crops, plantain (similar to bananas), Kanga ventured into off-season production to sell his produce at relatively higher prices.

“I am now a big farmer. The logic is simple: I deal in off-season plantain. When there is almost nothing on the market, mine is ready and therefore sells at a higher price,” says Kanga, who owns a 15 Ha plantain farm 30 kilometres from Abidjan, the Ivorian capital.

Harvesting 12 tonnes on average per hectare, Kanga is one of a few farmers re-writing the African story on agriculture, defying the common tale of a poor, hungry and food-insecure region with more than 232 million undernourished people – approximately one in four.

Albert Kanga on his plantain farm. Credit: Friday Phiri/IPS

With an estimated food import bill valued at 35.4 billion dollars in 2015, experts consider this scenario ironic because of Africa’s potential, boasting 60 percent of the world’s unused arable land, and where 60 percent of the workforce is employed in agriculture, accounting for roughly a third of the continent’s GDP.

The question is why? Several reasons emerge which include structural challenges rooted in poor infrastructure, governance and weak market value chains and institutions, resulting in low productivity. Additionally, women, who form the backbone of agricultural labour, are systematically discriminated against in terms of land ownership and other incentives such as credit and inputs, limiting their opportunities to benefit from agricultural value chains.

“Women own only one percent of land in Africa, receive one percent of agricultural credit and yet, constitute the majority of the agricultural labour force,” says Buba Khan, Africa Advocacy Officer at ActionAid.

Khan believes Africa may not be able to achieve food security, let alone sovereignty, if women remain marginalised in terms of land rights, and the World Bank Agenda for Global Food System sourcebook supports the ‘closing the gender gap’ argument.

According to the sourcebook, ensuring that women have the same access to assets, inputs, and services in agriculture as men could increase women’s yields on farms by 20-30 percent and potentially reduce the number of hungry people by 12-17 percent.

But empowering women is just one of the key pieces to the puzzle. According to the African Development Bank’s Feeding Africa agenda, number two on its agenda is dealing with deep-seated structural challenges, requiring ambition and investments.

According to the Bank’s analysis, transforming agricultural value chains would require approximately 280-340 billion dollars over the next decade, and this would likely create new markets worth 55-65 billion dollars per year by 2025. And the AfDB envisages quadrupling its investments from a current annual average of US 612 million to about 2.4 billion dollars to achieve this ambition.

“Our goal is clear: achieve food self-sufficiency for Africa in 10 years, eliminate malnutrition and hunger and move Africa to the top of agricultural value chains, and accelerate access to water and sanitation,” said Akinwumi Adesina, the AfDB Group President at the 2016 Annual Meetings, highlighting that the major focus of the bank’s “Feed Africa” agenda, is transforming agriculture into a business for farmers.

But even with this ambitious goal, and the colossal financial resources on the table, the how question remains critical. Through its strategy, the Bank sets to use agriculture as a starting point for industrialisation through multi-sectoral interventions in infrastructure, intensive use of agro inputs, mechanisation, enhanced access to credit and improved land tenure systems.

Notwithstanding these well tabulated interventions, there are trade-offs required to create a balance in either system considering the climate change challenge already causing havoc in the agriculture sector. The two schools of thought for agriculture development—Intensification (more yields per unit through intensive agronomical practices) and Extensification (bringing more land under cultivation), require a right balance.

“Agriculture matters for Africa’s development, it is the single largest source of income, food and market security, and it is also the single largest source of jobs. Yet, agriculture faces some enormous challenges, the most urgent being climate change and the sector is called to act. But there are trade-offs to either approaches of up-scaling. For example, extensification entails cutting more forests and in some cases, displacing people—both of which have a negative impact on Agriculture’s role to climate change mitigation,” says Sarwatt Hussein, Head of Communications at World Bank’s Agriculture Global Practice.

And this is a point that Ivorian Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Mamadou Coulibaly Sangafowa, stresses regarding Agricultural investments in Africa. “The emphasis is that agricultural investments should be climate-sensitive to unlock the opportunities especially for young Africans, and stop them from crossing the Mediterranean seeking economic opportunities elsewhere,” he said.

Coulibaly, who is also president of the African conference of Agricultural Ministers, identifies the need to improve specialised agricultural communication, without which farmers would continue working in the dark. “Farmers need information about latest technologies but it is not getting to them when they need it the most,” he said, highlighting the existing information gap, which the World Bank and the African Media Initiative (AMI) have also noted regarding media coverage of Agriculture in Africa.

While agriculture accounts for well over 60 percent of national economic activity and revenue in Africa, the sector gets a disproportionately small amount of media coverage, contributing less than 10 percent to the national economic and political discourse. And this underreporting has resulted not only in limited public knowledge of what actually goes on in the sector, but also in general, misconceptions about its place in the national and regional economy, notes the AMI-World bank analysis.

Whichever route Africa uses to achieve the overall target of feeding itself and be a net food exporter by 2025, Ivorian farmer, Albert Kanga has already started the journey—thanks to the World Bank supported West Africa Agricultural Productivity Programme-WAAPP, which introduced him to off-season production techniques.

According to Abdoulaye Toure, lead agro-economist at the World Bank, the WAAPP initiative which started in 2007 has changed the face of agriculture in the region. “When we started in 2007, there was a huge food deficit gap in West Africa, with productivity at around 20 percent, but it is now at 30 percent, and two similar programmes in Eastern and Southern Africa, have been launched as a result,” said Toure.

Some of the key elements of the programme include research, training of young scientists to replace the older generation, and dissemination of improved technologies to farmers. With in-country cluster research stations set up based on a particular country’s potential, there is improved information sharing on best practices.

“With new varieties introduced and off-season irrigation techniques through WAAPP, I am now an example,” says Farmer Kanga, who does not only supply to big supermarkets, but also exports to international markets such as Italy.

He recalls how he started the farm named after his late brother, Dougba, and wishes “he was alive to see how successful it has become.”

The feed Africa agenda targets to feed 150 million, and lift 100 million people out of poverty by 2025. But is it an achievable dream? Farmer Kanga is already showing that it is doable.

Credit: Construction Review Online

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Zimbabwe, Nov 13 2015 (IPS)

The upcoming week for the Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA), which runs from November 13-17 in Abidjan, the capital city of Ivory Coast, is set to throw this continent into the full gear of infrastructural boom, development experts here say.

“If PIDA and what it all entails may be strictly followed by Africa and its leaders, yes, truly the underdeveloped continent may see itself emerging from the era of infrastructural underdevelopment and help the continent attract much needed foreign investors,” Zimbabwean independent economist, Kingston Nyakurukwa, told IPS.

For African nations, from the outset PIDA was meant to promote socio-economic development and poverty reduction through improved access to integrated regional and continental infrastructure networks and services.

Owing to the infrastructure deficit facing Africa, in July 2010, African leaders launched PIDA under the leadership of the African Union, New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and the African Development Bank (AfDB).

At its launch, PIDA’s presidency was initially assumed by South African President Jacob Zuma, thanks to his country’s successful organization of the World Cup in 2010, which inspired the entire continent.

Then Zuma said: “Africa’s time has come and without infrastructure, our dreams will never be realized. We cannot trade on the continent because of the lack of communication. The infrastructure that we want to create will provide new opportunities for our continent.”

With the African Development Bank Group being the executing agency, PIDA was designed as successor to the NEPAD Medium to Long Term Strategic Framework (MLTSF), which was meant to develop a vision and strategic framework for the development of regional and continental infrastructure.

For many development experts here, like Henry Kakonye, Africa has however lacked development in infrastructure over the years, impacting negatively on the continent’s economic growth.

“Lack of infrastructure development in Africa over the years has gradually affected productivity and resulted in rising production and transaction costs, subsequently derailing growth through slowing competitiveness of businesses and the ability of governments to chase economic and social development policies,” Kakonye told IPS.

According to the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), PIDA will also help the objectives for Sustainable Energy in Africa in line with the UN’s sustainable development goal to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.

But in developing Africa’s infrastructure, NEPAD has also been on record saying the private sector cannot be left out.

“With support from the private sector, PIDA is expected to play a critical role in addressing the continent’s infrastructure problems,” said Adama Deen, head of Infrastructure Programmes and Projects at the NEAPAD Agency while speaking at a recent NEPAD forum in Johannesburg, South Africa.

“Infrastructure is essential for integrating regions, realising socio-economic potential and fast-tracking development in Africa,” Deen had added.

And based on NEPAD Division at the African Development Bank, the continent would require investment of about 360 billion dollars in infrastructure in order to be well connected to the rest of the world by 2040.

To this, PIDA, a joint initiative by the African Union, NEPAD and the AfDB, aims to develop a web of 37,200 km of highways, 30,200 km of railways and 16,500 km of interconnected power lines by 2040 while at the same time it plans to add 54,150 megawatts of hydroelectric power generation capacity and an extra 1.3-billion tons capacity at Africa’s ports, according to AfDB’s Ralph Olaye.

The South African Energy Ministry has also been on record saying no infrastructure programme could be successful if it is not linked to continental development objectives.

As such, according to the SA government, PIDA remains key to the Southern African region and the entire Africa to promote socio-economic development.

Chief Executive Officer of the NEPAD Agency, Dr Ibrahim Mayaki, during this year’s commemorations of the Africa Day agreed with the SA government.

“Bridging the gap in infrastructure is thus vital for economic advancement and sustainable development. However, this can only be achieved through regional and continental cooperation and solution finding,” Mayaki said then.

“In fact, now more than ever is the time for us all to live up to the courage of our convictions for an integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa, driven by its own citizens – as is espoused by NEPAD. Leadership is no longer a top down issue,” Mayaki had added.

(End)

Informal traders at Malanga market on the outskirts of Maputo, Mozambique. Most of the products on offer are purchased in Zimbabwe or South Africa. Credit: Nastasya Tay/IPS

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Apr 18 2014 (IPS)

As the World Bank wrapped up its semi-annual joint meetings with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) here last weekend, it reaffirmed its commitment to bringing extreme poverty below three percent of the global population by 2030 while increasing the income of the poorest 40 percent of the population of each country.

However, some suggest that in sub-Saharan Africa, this may be impossible.It’s not easy to fix a country, rebuild institutions and get growth going while making sure it’s consistent, shared and inclusive. Poverty pockets exist in the large, vital countries.

“Even under our ‘best case’ scenario of accelerated consumption growth and income redistribution from the 10 percent richest to the 40 percent poorest segment of population, the 2030 poverty rate would be around 10 percent,” says a new report from the African Development Bank (AfDB). “A more realistic goal for the region seems to be reducing poverty by a range from half to two thirds.”

Although extreme poverty will likely remain high in Africa by 2030, AfDB’s chief economist, Mthuli Ncube, the new report’s chief author, painted a cautiously optimistic picture as to the prospects for poverty reduction in Africa during an interview with IPS.

Q: Even though the World Bank goal is to reduce extreme poverty by less than three percent globally by 2030, Africa won’t be able to meet that goal. Can you give us more background as to why that is?

A: Our view is that it’s a good goal to have … but it differs from region to region. The region that is likely to achieve this ambitious goal is Asia, not Africa. Although Africa has made tremendous progress, there’s still a lot of work to do. Under our baseline scenario, Africa will achieve something like 25 to 27 percent poverty levels in the year 2030. Currently it’s about 48 percent. So in this case we’re talking about something like a 50 percent reduction, maybe.

It’s a monumental task. Why? We’ve some challenges in Africa. One is fragility. If you look at some of the large countries with a lot of poverty – like the [Democratic Republic of Congo], it is a fragile country. It’s not easy to fix a country, rebuild institutions and get growth going while making sure it’s consistent, shared and inclusive. Poverty pockets exist in the large, vital countries.

Even if you have growth, growth is just simply not shared. If you use a more inclusive definition of growth and poverty reduction … service delivery around health care and education is very difficult. These are large countries where governments are decentralised.

Q: Nigeria is one of the more populous countries, and it’s now surpassed South Africa as Africa’s largest economy. Yet it still seems like there’s a large degree of extreme poverty there. How does income inequality play into extreme poverty?

A: In Nigeria, the new figure says that the size of the economy is 510 billion dollars, larger than South Africa. Income per capita has gone up to about 2,400 dollars, so it looks much better than before. But after this announcement, it doesn’t change people’s lives. They’re still poor. So it becomes an overall aggregate figure and that speaks to inequality.

Inequality is high and it also has a way of slowing a country down in its poverty-reduction drive. The more poverty you have, the less productive you become, which impacts your ability to grow.

Our analysts show that the long-term [obstacle] in dealing with extreme poverty is to get the children of the poor into school, to have them stay in school and finish school. That is the only way. Education is the biggest driver of getting people out of extreme poverty … and into the middle class. And then, because they all have decent incomes and jobs, they will keep their children out of poverty.

Let’s not forget, in the interim, the role of short-term social protection programmes. Brazil had an incredible track record under [President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva], with a programme called Bolsa Familia that got 30 to 40 million people out of poverty through social protection programmes.

There are countries in Africa trying to do that – Rwanda, South Africa and Ethiopia. Ethiopia is the one country that I think is going to rotate out of extreme poverty by 2030, so it’s going to be the most successful in dealing with poverty out of the large-population countries.

Ultimately there need to be some short-term measures, but the long-term measure is education.

Q: Which sub-Saharan African countries are doing particularly well at reducing extreme poverty?

A: Ethiopia is the one that we can really highlight because it’s a large population, nearly 85 million, and they’re dealing with the reduction of extreme poverty as a problem. First, the big story about poverty reduction is sustaining growth, and Ethiopia’s had a wonderful growth rate for the past 10 years.

Second is making sure that it’s inclusive, shared and creates opportunity. It should create jobs and finance services for access to education, health, housing and so forth. All those are strategies for sharing wealth.

It’s also about social protection programmes that keep the people out of poverty and then allow them to make progress. Let me tell you this story about the Grinka Programme in Rwanda. You leave one pregnant cow to a poor household, and that cow will have a calf and another one and so forth. And if it’s a female calf, you pass that calf on to the next poor family and then the next poor family.

In the next few years, that programme is going to take about 300,000 families in Rwanda out of poverty. Why? These families can harvest the milk and consume it. Secondly, they can sell the milk and the manure, but also use [the manure] to grow vegetables, which they can then sell and make money. So you create a whole economic ecosystem around the cow.

I even suggested this for Somalia. Maybe there’s an asset-replacement programme that could cause similar results elsewhere. This is a case of what I would call productive social protection, because you’re giving someone an asset that produces something and it actually works.

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