The World Bank has committed $22.5 billion to Africa for climate adaptation and mitigation in the next five years.
The funding is part of the World Bank’s 2025 target to accelerate climate action. It was launched in December 2018 during the UN’s COP24 held in Poland. It will help African countries manage the risks of a changing climate while unlocking new investment opportunities.
In December 2018, Mercom reported that World Bank had pledged a corpus of $200 billion for climate action over five years. Out of the $200 billion, approximately $100 billion will be provided in direct finance from the World Bank, and approximately $100 billion of combined direct finance from the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) and private capital mobilized by the World Bank Group.
The World Bank recognizes many countries in Africa are among the most vulnerable to global climate change, and therefore more than half of the $22.5 billion financing will be given to support the climate adaptation and resilience in the continent.
“People across Africa are already experiencing the growing impacts of climate change. This region is particularly vulnerable to increasing floods, droughts and destructive storms. That’s why the World Bank is providing more money to build resilience and help communities cope with the effects of climate change in Africa,” said Kristalina Georgieva, Interim President of the World Bank Group.
The World Bank has taken many initiatives in Africa to mitigate the risk of climate change. For example, it is helping Rwanda and Kenya to achieve their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) with generous support from Germany’s BMZ. It has also provided Ethiopia $500 million for improving watershed management and land administration systems.
Carbon Initiative for Development (Ci-Dev) trust fund, a trustee of the World Bank, and Kenya Tea Development Agency Power Company Ltd. (KTDA Power) have signed an Emission Reductions Purchase Agreement which purchases carbon credits from small hydropower plants and provide power to 350,000 small-holder tea farmers.
Last year, the Kenyan government launched a new program called Kenya National Electrification Strategy. The ambitious program has been developed in partnership with the World Bank, and it aims to provide a roadmap for achieving universal access to electricity for all Kenyans by 2022.
Recently, the World Bank and Agence Française de Développement (AFD), France’s public development bank, announced that they are jointly working on a Solar Risk Mitigation Initiative to improve solar energy deployment in some of the world’s poorest countries. The initiative will cover policy, technical, and financial issues related to the deployment of solar energy in these countries.