Nigeria appears to be in a good stead to reap bountifully from outcomes of the UK-Africa Investment Summit held in London on Monday, January 20, 2020.
Ahead of the 26th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP26) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that the United Kingdom will host in Glasgow, Scotland in November 2020, a central theme of the UK-Africa Investment Summit was support for African leaders’ call to accelerate investment in secure, low-cost and low carbon energy.
Minister of State for the Environment, Sharon Ikeazor, attended the Summit and met the UK Secretary of State for Business, Energy, Innovation and Skills, Andrea Leadsom, to explore ways in which the UK and Nigeria can further strengthen collaboration on sustainable development, tackling climate change and on broader environmental issues
During the Summit, the UK Government committed to use its expertise and experience to partner with African countries to help them transition away from fossil fuels towards renewable, sustainable forms of clean energy.
In total, more than £50 million (₦28.6billion) of new UK investment was pledged at the Summit for clean energy projects across Africa and new links were forged between UK and African companies, investors and policy makers to promote clean energy usage.
Specifically, Nigeria stands to benefit from the following announcements made at the Summit:
- Commercial deals worth £7 million (₦3.31billion) in the clean energy sector from Low Energy Designs (street lighting) and Trilliant (smart metering for Abuja DisCo);
- £38 million (₦18.billion) boost to the Department for International Development’s Climate Compatible Growth Fund to support African governments to use UK expertise to expand their electricity networks and develop cleaner technologies;
- £10 million (over ₦4.7 billion) of funding for the UK Department of Business, Energy, Innovation and Skills (BEIS) Climate Finance Accelerator (CFA), a new technical assistance programme designed to accelerate the transformation of African countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions into a pipeline of bankable low-carbon projects with the potential to attract investment at scale from the private sector;
- The convening, before the Summit, of the Clean Energy “Pacesetters Group” (Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, Morocco, Senegal and Sierra Leone) to partner with UK;
- Technical expertise and demonstrate leadership and best practice in the clean energy transition;
- A new £230,000 (about ₦109 million) DFID partnership with Lighting Africa to construct five solar testing labs across Africa, with the first to be launched in Nigeria and designed to help low-income consumers have access to high-quality solar products; and,
- Support for the Energy Commission of Nigerian (ECN) to update and expand its 2050 Calculator, an energy and emissions model that supports sustainable development planning.
