PACJA launches project meant to increase renewable energy access

The Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA, through the Kenya Platform on Climate Governance (KPCG), the Africa Coalition for Sustainable Energy and Access, in partnership with German-watch have today launched a project that will bring consumers at the centre of energy debates.

 To be implemented in five countries including Kenya, Cameroon, Nigeria, Morocco, and Botswana, the project that is dubbed “Ensuring a People-Centered Energy Transition in Africa through Civil Society Engagement” will ensure that, energy transition in Africa is driven by the people and making sure it is inclusive to all.

“For transition to be just, vulnerable people cannot be kept out of the decision table. Civil Society should and must be at the frontline to ensure a frank and inclusive engagement of people on the ground,” said Dr Mithika Mwenda, the Executive Director, PACJA.

He said the problem of access to energy normally manifests around the daily lives of women, specifically, the rural women.

According to Dr Augustine Ndjamnshi, the Chair of the Technical and Political Committee of the PACJA, the choice of the Kenyan launch was informed by the fact that the Kenyan energy sector is poised to be one of the most progressive on the continent – only second to South African.

He said the project strengthens African CSOs to work towards Just transition and promoting access to energy through an inclusive agen

da and to secure a just process of transition for everyone on the African continent.

Currently, the sector has an installed power capacity of 2,732MW with KenGen contributing 61% (1,630MW) and IPPs contributing the difference.

The Geothermal Development Company (GDC) oversees early geothermal steam development while the Nuclear Power and Energy Agency (NuPEA) develops framework and implementation of the national nuclear power development programme with a view to introducing nuclear power within the power subsector.

However, other sector reforms and strategies including those proposed in the Kenyan NDCs like Solar PV and Solar Thermal Regulations, Energy Efficiency and Conservation Policy (Energy Management Regulations 2012), Universal Access of Electricity by 2020 and the FiT (2008, 2012) and Energy Act 2019 aim at opening access for the transmission and distribution systems, creation of consolidated fund and creation of the net metering regulatory framework, among others for the stakeholders and consumers to actively engage and meet the growing demand respectively.

Regardless, statistics have increasingly shown limited involvement of key stakeholders – especially the non-state actors – in driving a people responsive, environmentally just and climate resilient energy systems – especially drawing the conclusions from the sector report launched by the president in 20211.

Global energy poverty is now concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Currently, around 580 million in the region, roughly 75% of the global total, have no electricity (IEA, 2019). And a staggering 80% of the population (about 800 million people) lacks access to modern energy and relies on biomass products such as wood, charcoal, and dung to cook.

This acute energy poverty affects many developments and environmental outcomes negatively; notably health, household income, quality of life, access to modern services such as ICTs (Morrissey, 2017), as well as human capital development, productive land use, and sustainable forest management. Across the continent, it is preventing women and children from leading more productive lives, expanding inequality gaps, and fomenting a wide range of social injustices. It is lowering the region’s chance of attaining the Sustainable Development Goals (Corfee-Morlot, et al. nd) and Africa’s Agenda 2063.

To address these gaps, civil society engagement is crucial to facilitate and push for renewable energy initiatives and an energy transition that is sustainable and people-oriented. Civil society participation has the potential to ensure buy-in, prevent external interests from driving RE development, and guarantee that development is designed with a thorough understanding of the local context, social norms, values, and customs.

This will be achieved by building a critical mass of the none-state-actors that will interrogate RE investments against a set of minimum criteria and ensure that RE initiatives prioritize decentralised small-scale RE investments that meet the needs of the people.

Consequently, the Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA, through the the Kenya Platform on Climate Governance (KPCG), the Africa Coalition for Sustainable Energy and Access, in partnership with German-watch and plan to launch the Kenya component of the project “Ensuring a People-Centered Energy Transition in Africa through Civil Society Engagement” on 10 and 11 March 2022. The project launch will take the form of an inception workshop and training of RE for members of KPCG and other relevant stakeholder. KPCG is also collaborating with VSO on capacity building and stock take on just energy transition perspectives among stakeholders

Objective

The main objective of the inception workshop is to achieve consensus of what the project is hoping to achieve – a collective understanding among project CSO beneficiaries and other stakeholders. The workshop shall pursue the following specific objectives:

Specific objectives

⚫ To build a common understanding of the project objectives and expected outcomes and implementation modalities among all project partners and stakeholders;

⚫ To develop a road map of project coordination at the national level including roles and expected benefits/needs of the mapped institutions;

⚫ To review and update project implementation tools, including M&E baseline data

⚫ To share experiences and information on existing projects, programmes at national or regional levels to ensure synergies and avoid overlapping of activities;

⚫ To identify and expand the network of stakeholders and beneficiaries.