Akinwumi Adesina, the African Development Bank’s new president has said that he will mobilize $55 billion a year to bring electricity to the poorest parts of the continent within a decade and will focus on investments in renewable energy to make it happen, Bloomberg reports.
Adesina, the former Nigerian minister of agriculture, is implementing a program dubbed The New Energy Deal for Africa, which aims to extend electricity to the entire continent by 2025. Adesina wants aid donors and African governments to scale up investment in energy and will use the bank’s leverage to encourage financial flows from private companies.
The focus will be on renewables but it however doesn’t also rule out coal, which the World Bank is prodding development institutions to fund only in the most extraordinary circumstances.
The bank is working closely with public institutions such as the World Bank, International Finance Corp. and the governments of the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Japan and China. It is also trying to spur private investment by reducing the risk of projects with partial risk guarantees and credit enhancement instruments. It has recently created Africa50, a platform to work on project development, with the goal of leveraging $10 billion of private investment into the energy industry over the next 10 years.