COP27: Africa, Global Partners Raise $500m For Green Infrastructure

The Alliance for Green Infrastructure in Africa will raise up to $500 million to provide early-stage project development capital.

This is capital that will build a robust pipeline of bankable projects, starting with pre-feasibility stage all the way through to commercial and financial close.

Similarly, the African Union(AU), the African Development Bank(AfDB) Group and Africa50, in partnership with several global partners, have launched the Alliance for Green Infrastructure in Africa (AGIA), an initiative to help scale and accelerate financing for green infrastructure projects in Africa.

The collaborating global partners working with the African Union, African Development Bank and Africa50 are the African Union Development Agency, the European Investment Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the French Development Agency, The Rockefeller Foundation, the US Trade and Development Agency, the Global Center on Adaptation, the Private Infrastructure Development Group, and the African Sovereign Investors Forum.

The launch ceremony which took place on the sidelines of the ongoing 27th annual global climate summit (COP27) in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, was to raise significant capital to accelerate Africa’s just and equitable transition to Net Zero emissions. It has two strategic objectives. The first is to generate a robust pipeline of transformational bankable projects. The second is to catalyze financing at scale and speed for Africa’s infrastructure.

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While the Alliance for Green Infrastructure in Africa will raise up to $500 million to provide early-stage project development capital, this is projected to generate up to $10 billion worth of investments in green infrastructure.

This will be mobilised from a combination of co-investments, co-financing, risk mitigation and blended finance provided by Alliance members. This capital will also be drawn from other financial institutions and foundations, public and private global and African institutional investors, project sponsors, multilateral development banks’ sovereign operations, and from G-20 bilateral donors.

The Alliance’s focus sectors are energy, transport, water and sanitation, health infrastructure, broadband infrastructure, urban and rural infrastructure. It will support large-scale programs, such as mega solar projects or green hydrogen projects, as well as smaller venture capital initiatives like cleantech projects, energy storage or e-mobility solutions.

In introductory remarks, African Development Bank Group President Dr. Akinwumi Adesina said: “the AGIA platform is a new platform that is fully aligned with the global call of the G7 leaders in June this year when they called for the partnership on global infrastructure and investment to mobilize $600 billion in infrastructure by 2027, especially to support sustainable, quality and climate-resilient infrastructure.

“We need you all, as the needs in Africa are simply enormous. Only by working together and pooling our resources together can we make transformative impacts and set Africa on a clear path to achieving NetZero emissions and to mitigate climate change. Africa needs infrastructure financing, estimated at between $130 billion to $170 billion a year, with an infrastructure financing gap of up to $108 billion a year.

“But most of the infrastructure for Africa is yet to be built. This presents an enormous opportunity to get it right. Build green infrastructure that is climate-smart and that is climate-resilient.”

African Union commissioner for Energy and Infrastructure, Dr. Amani Abou-Zeid added, “as African institutions, we must focus on early-stage project preparation, de-risking interventions, and building a robust business environment to attract investors from all parts of the world. We want to galvanize around priority projects that combine all our efforts to deliver. We must now intensify our efforts and move faster and at scale.”

Africa50 CEO, Alain Ebobissé said: “I am excited about AGIA’s mandate. It’s an initiative that is results-oriented, rapidly scaling projects from the concept stage to bankability. I look forward to partnering with more development institutions and private sector players within Africa and globally, to leverage additional resources, so we can deploy the $10 billion we have set as target for AGIA’s green, sustainable infrastructure investments.”