The African Development Bank, AFDB, has said it would double its climate finance commitments for the period 2020-2025.
This was announced by the Bank’s President, Mr. Akinwumi Adesina on Thursday at the One Planet Summit taking place in Nairobi.
He said that the Bank would commit at least US$25 billion towards climate finance.
Speaking at a plenary in the presence of Heads of State, including President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya, and French President Emmanuel Macron, Adesina also disclosed that the Bank was on course to achieve its target of allocating 40% of its funding to climate finance by 2020, a year ahead.
The Bank’s commitment on the target, the highest among all multilateral development banks, has progressed steadily from 9% in 2016 to 28% in 2017 and 32% in 2018.
In a statement issued by APO Group on its behalf, the Bank noted that had successfully raised its adaptation finance from less than 30% of total climate finance to parity with mitigation in 2018 and would continue the trend into the future.
“The required level of financing is only feasible with the direct involvement of the entire financial sector. Consequently, the Bank launched the African Financial Alliance for Climate Change, AFAC, to link all stock exchanges, pension and sovereign wealth funds, central Banks and other financial institutions of Africa to mobilize and incentivize the shift of their portfolios towards low carbon and climate resilient investments,” the Bank’s President explained.
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Furthermore, he said: “It is not good enough to simply ask countries to stay away from polluting technologies. We have to be proactive in exploring alternatives. We will therefore be launching the ‘green baseload’ facility under the Sustainable Energy Fund for Africa (SEFA 2.0) to provide concessional finance and technical assistance to support the penetration and scale-up of renewable energy, to provide affordable and reliable renewable energy baseload.”
Adesina disclosed that several donors, including Canada, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Italy, the UK and USAID have indicated interest in being part of the “transformative instrument, which would also help to replace coal.”
AFDB has played a critical role in building Africa’s clean energy capacities and in line with its ambitious New Deal on Energy for Africa, 95% of all Bank investments in power generation over the 2016-18 period have been in renewables.
It’s “Desert to Power” program, a $10 billion initiative to build a 10 GW solar zone across the Sahel—the largest in the world— would provide electricity for 250 million people. Together with partners such as the Green Climate Fund and the EU, the Bank has now financed the first project under this Initiative: The Yeleen Rural Electrification Project in Burkina Faso.
