EDITORIAL
THIS TIME FOR AFRICA
Dear Reader,
tremendous opportunity. The continent has a make or break role to play in whether the world can achieve the pledges and targets put forth at the COPs over the years, which is why we’re devoting this issue of the OPEC Fund Quarterly to the many ways Africa can help meet those goals. We’ll hear from Leiden University’s Ayokun u Adedokun on the stakes many African countries face from food insecurity, extreme poverty, shaky governance and inadequate access to basic services. Crucially, he offers four policy solutions that offer a way out (see page 6). Since inception, roughly half of the OPEC Fund’s operations have benefitted African countries. On page 10, we hear from the institution’s Mahmoud Khene and Khaled Al-Zayer, public sector directors for the Africa region who are focused on the many lessons and experiences drawn from their decades of development work. Sprinkled throughout the issue, you’ll find some examples of the OPEC Fund’s African operations over the years, which have supported the energy, water & sanitation, education and agriculture sectors, among many others. Chances are, you carry a piece of Africa around in your pocket every day. The continent is a primary source of many of the minerals needed in today’s
Africa, it has been said many times before, is a continent of great opportunities but also great challenges. For African countries, the recently concluded UN Climate Change Conference (COP28) in Dubai was an especially critical one in how it would be able to address those challenges. After all, Africa as a region produces only a small share of greenhouse gas emissions compared to its continental neighbors, and yet is greatly affected by the climate change those emissions cause. Africa’s future therefore, has much to gain, or lose, on the conference’s outcomes. “The COP is the scoreboard, not the game,” writes Bill McKibben, a frequent climate contributor to the New Yorker magazine. A brief look at the past few COPs (or UNFCCC Conference of the Parties) and it might seem like the score should be pretty high already. During the Paris climate summit in 2015 (aka COP21) the world agreed to “pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees C above pre- industrial levels”. At last year’s climate summit in Egypt (aka COP27), the big news was the agreement over a loss and damage fund that would help developing countries experiencing the worst impacts of climate change. At the most recent conference, held in
the United Arab Emirates (aka COP28), one big outcome was the following sentence: “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.” Yet that’s only one half of the scoreboard in a game that everyone agreed is football, but doesn’t quite realize that it’s not the o jogo bonito (Brazil’s beautiful game) variety with its slow action and single-digit scores, but rather gridiron football comprising quick action, hard-fought progress and a scoring system that accumulates swiftly and mercilessly. The focus of COP28’s Global Stocktake, a reality check on climate action, is energy-related. While the inclusion of the phrase “transitioning away from fossil fuels” is what made the headlines, the other mentions of energy are also important in the struggle towards enabling sustainable development for everyone. New calls to triple global renewable energy capacity and double the rate of energy efficiency by 2030 are also critical, especially for a world where 760 million people lack access to electricity, according to the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2023 . Eighty percent of those people live in sub-Saharan Africa.
As a whole, Africa is a place of tremendous challenges, but also
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