On Saturday 27 September, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced a €545 million package to accelerate the energy transition on the African continent.
It is a ‘Team Europe’ initiative bringing together the EU, EU Member States and their implementing agencies and public development banks, as well as the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).
Presented at the Global Citizen Festival during the United Nations General Assembly in New York, this initiative is part of the ‘Scaling Up Renewables in Africa’ campaign, co-hosted with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. It aims to mobilise public and private investment for the production of and access to clean energy in Africa, where almost 600 million people still live without electricity.
Most of the projects supported are in Côte d'Ivoire (€359.4 million), with a high-voltage transmission line (“Dorsale Est”), but there are also projects in Cameroon (€59.1 million), Congo (€3.5 million), Lesotho (€25.9 million), Ghana (€2 million), Madagascar (€33.2 million), Mozambique (€13 million) and Somalia (€45.5 million).
Supported by the EU’s Global Gateway investment strategy, these projects focus, among other things, on electrification, network modernisation and regional electricity exchanges.
The ‘Scaling Up Renewables in Africa’ campaign will culminate in a high-level event at the G20 summit in South Africa on 22 and 23 November. (Original version in French by Pauline Denys)