This is contained in a statement from the Communication and External Relations Department of the AfDB.

However, the fund was approved by the bank’s Board of Directors on June 24.

According to the statement, the grant from the African Development Fund, the concessional window of the AfDB Bank Group will go to the ECOWAS Regional Electricity Regulatory Authority.

The ultimate objective is to stimulate cross-border electricity trade and improve energy access in the 15 countries in the region.

Mr. Solomon Sarpong, Project team leader at the AfDB said the project would facilitate regional electricity trade and help improve access to electricity.

“It will address major causes of fragility, such as infrastructure bottlenecks, youth unemployment, environmental challenges, gender inequalities, and regional development imbalances,” Sarpong said.

The project has five components.

The first involves selecting electricity regulatory principles and key performance indicators from the AfDB’s flagship Electricity Regulatory Index for Africa report, to be adopted by the ECOWAS Regional Electricity Regulatory Authority.

The project would build capacity in member countries for collecting and reporting on these indicators on a common platform.

The second component would involve conducting a study in order to update a comparative analysis of electricity tariffs and their underlying drivers across the electricity value chain of ECOWAS.

The third involves developing a centralised database management system that would provide a platform for digitally collecting relevant energy information from member countries, storing, and disseminating them on a common digital platform.

The fourth component would assess and identify project bottlenecks and risks in ECOWAS member countries.

It would also recommend a coherent approach to progressively address ground-level barriers to investment in the power sector in pre- and post-establishment phases of the regional electricity market.

The final component focuses on programme management and capacity building, which would be co-financed with the Regional Electricity Regulatory Authority.

All components of the project would include gender-disaggregated data.

Established on May 28, 1975 via the Treaty of Lagos, ECOWAS is a regional organisation that promotes economic integration in the constituting countries. ECOWAS consists of 15 countries.

The countries are Benin, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo.

ECOWAS has an estimated population of 360 million people.

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Speaking at a plenary in the presence of Heads of State, including President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya, and French President Emmanuel Macron, Adesina also announced the Bank is on course to achieve its target of allocating 40% of its funding to climate finance by 2020, a year ahead. The Bank’s commitment on the target, the highest among all multilateral development banks, has progressed steadily from 9% in 2016 to 28% in 2017 and 32% in 2018.

Considering Africa’s high vulnerability despite contributing the least to climate change, the African Development Bank has successfully raised its adaptation finance from less than 30% of total climate finance to parity with mitigation in 2018. The African Development Bank will continue this trend into the future.

“The required level of financing is only feasible with the direct involvement of the entire financial sector,” said Adesina. “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 made another milestone announcement. “It is not good enough to simply ask countries to stay away from polluting technologies,” Adesina said. “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.”

Several donors, including Canada, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Italy, the UK and USAID have indicated their interest in this transformative instrument, which will also help to replace coal. The African Development Bank has played a critical role in building Africa’s clean energy capacities. The Bank’s last investment in a coal project was 10 years ago. Additionally, 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.

The “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.

Key Bank projects include the co-financing of the 510 MW Ouarzazate Solar Complex in Morocco, one of the largest solar complexes in the world.

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