PACJA spearheads plans to ensuring a People-Centered Energy Transition in Africa

Cairo, 14 December 2021: The Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA) and the Germanwatch are holding an inception workshop in Egypt for a project (Ensuring a People-Centered Energy Transition in Africa Through Civil Society Engagement) meant to strengthen the role of civil society in the promotion and implementation of sustainable energy transition initiatives as well as renewable energy related NDC commitments in Africa five (5) countries.

The project will equip CSOs with skills, knowledge and tools to engage in renewable energy policy development and strengthen their voice at the domestic, continental and global levels. The project will also ensure that CSO engagement is more coordinated, through the strengthening of the Africa Coalition for Sustainable Energy and Access (ACSEA).

The project has been informed by the fact that the 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 2065.

Access to clean, sustainable and modern energy services is needed to meet basic human needs and for economic and social development across Africa. Increased access to energy, ‘can unlock sustainable economic growth, improve human health and well-being and enable women and children to lead more productive lives. Beyond direct economic and social benefits, clean energy access will raise human security and build resilience in states and communities to help limit the risk of large-scale migration across the African continent as well as accelerate the attainment of SDGs, Agenda 2063 goals and climate commitments under the Paris Agreement’ (OECD, nd).

Renewable energy initiatives (REI) are lining up to drive RE uptake on the continent. The number of these initiatives has grown to at least 58 (Kirsten et al., 2020), most of them since the concluding of the Paris Agreement in 2018. The more prominent REIs include the Africa-EU Renewable Energy Cooperation Program (RECP), EU-Africa Green Energy Initiative, Africa Power Vision, Africa Clean Energy Corridor, and the African Energy Transition Programme (AFRETRAP). Bilateral actors, notably China and India, have also entering the RE space.

National political will is also growing and present opportunities for a sustainable energy transition. Of the 53 submitted NDCs, all but Botswana’s NDC mention renewable energy contributions, with quantitative figures in 46 of them. Many of these contain rural-development and pro-poor renewable energy contributions, such as the electrification of rural areas with standalone PV systems and mini-grids, or sustainable use of biomass. 

The expansion of the RE playing field, however, also presents risks. The many REIs in Africa lack coordination and transparency; often exclude important stakeholders, particularly of the civil society; and are poorly governed. This leaves room for unnecessary redundant efforts, program and project duplications; a narrow focus on certain RE solutions and countries; and the absence of independent means of monitoring and tracking their performance. In turn, these shortcomings undermine the effectiveness of RE initiatives in delivering transformative and sustainable energy access, especially for the poor.

To address these risks, civil society engagement is crucial to facilitate and push for renewable energy initiatives and an energy transition that are 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.

CSOs have been working on the climate crisis and energy sector for many years. However, lack enough technical capacity to engage with energy policy development. In addition, a continent-wide civil society coalition focused on renewable energy, closely following REIs and renewable energy related NDC commitments on the continent is lacking.

The Egyptian workshop aims to;  

• Building consensus of what the project is hoping to achieve – a collective understanding among project CSO beneficiaries and other stakeholders. This is crucial and will involve exploring the various tracks through CSOs mapping of experiences and best practices that are people centred.
• Establish effective alliance cooridnation and clarify roles are responsibilities. Most projects without clarity of coordination process and effective invovment in alliance coordination can be problematic in the future hence this inception workshop to clear this up for project smooth take off.
• Initiate groundbreaking CSOs policy engagement with the relevent policy makers and Finannce Institutions (such as the African Development Bank) on renewable energy initiaves.

Provide visibility actions including statement of action via social and convenetional media briefing promoting PACJA-Germanwatch initiative to ensuring a people centred energy transition in Africa. From the outset, the inception workshop will provdie the opportunity to showcase the ACSEA initiave and its goals and objectives towards promoting CSOs capacity building and sustainable renewable energy transition.