NEWS

The Sustainable Energy Fund for Africa (SEFA) has secured $64 million in new funding from the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD) and the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP).

SEFA, a multi-donor special fund managed by the African Development Bank, provides concessional finance to unlock private sector investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency.

Commenting on the grant, Norway’s Minister for International Development, Anne Beathe Tvinnereim, emphasised SEFA’s ongoing contribution to tackling some of the biggest challenges hindering access to clean energy in Africa. “Six hundred million Africans lack connection to electricity and 900 million do not have modern cooking stoves,” Tvinnereim said. “With today’s announcement, NORAD – SEFA’s partner since 2018 – increased its contribution to $54.72 million.”

Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet executive director for Africa Joseph Nganga said GEAPP was proud to partner with the AfDB to expand access to clean, affordable, and reliable energy for communities across Africa.

“We are leapfrogging polluting energy sources and supporting decarbonisation across the energy sector. Together we will focus our efforts on sustainable energy projects with a high potential to be transformative, scalable and replicable, and we look forward to supporting SEFA to catalyse and leverage additional financing for these pivotal projects,” he added.

SEFA catalyses private sector investment in Africa

Dr Daniel Schroth, AfDB director for renewable energy and energy efficiency, acknowledged the importance of the grant funding. “These new contributions to SEFA are a recognition of the critical role played by SEFA in catalysing private sector investments in Africa’s sustainable energy sector and they will allow SEFA to further scale-up its investments over the coming years,” he said.

The announcement came during a panel discussion as part of the 2022 COP27 discussions. The panel discussion, titled Renewable energy for climate action, socio-economic transformation in Africa: the role of SEFA, featured Minister Tvinnereim and Ed Borgstein, GEAPP’s director of country programmes.

Also on the panel, Geoff Sinclair, Managing Director of the Renewable Energy Performance Platform congratulated SEFA on the new funding. He noted that “SEFA plays a critical role in catalysing African sustainable energy development and convened an important conversation about how to increase the scale and rate of implementation. It was clear that all actors in the sector need to collaborate more to do this, and I’m looking forward to following up to put that collaboration into action.”

Ash Sharma, Vice President of the Nordic Green Bank said, “Public finance channelled through results-based financing has an important role to play in help to de-risk and scale expansion of off grid electricity solutions and modern clean cooking solutions. The Nordic Green Bank manages two multi-donor SDG7 instruments to support these sectors in nine African countries through the Beyond the Grid Fund for Africa and the Modern Cooking Facility for Africa, respectively.”