Africa to Receive $1.1 billion in New Financing for Climate Action

Barcelona, Spain

From solar water heaters to wind power development and development policy planning, a range of new, scalable investments were given the green light at Trustee meetings of the Climate Investment Funds (CIF) in Washington. Mozambique, Niger and Zambia will each receive up to $50-70 million in additional resources to help transform their economies through climate resilience. While, Morocco and South Africa will join Egypt in receiving very low-interest loans for $150 million, $500 million, and $300 million respectively, to strengthen their investments in clean energy in support of national priorities for low carbon development.

The Climate Investment Funds are a unique pair of financing instruments designed to test what can be achieved to initiate transformational change towards low-carbon and climate-resilient development through scaled-up financing channeled through the Multilateral Development Banks. The two funds are the Clean Technology Fund (CTF), financing scaled up demonstration, deployment and transfer of low-carbon technologies for significant greenhouse gas reductions within country investment plans; and the Strategic Climate Fund (SCF), financing targeted programs in developing countries to pilot new climate or sectoral approaches with scaling-up potential.

In Africa, where access to energy is critical for economic growth and, therefore, poverty alleviation, the challenge is to help countries obtain the energy they need, without aggravating climate change. South Africa will receive $500 million from the CTF to support its goals of generating four percent of the country

Source: IWR Online, 06 Nov 2009