The Green Climate Fund to finance renewable energy in West Africa

The Board of the Green Climate Fund has approved a €100 million loan through the West-African Development Bank (BOAD) to finance renewable energy development in six countries from the West African Economic and Monetary Union.

The project is driven by the Green Climate Fund and executed by BOAD, is a climate finance facility to scale up solar energy investments in Francophone West Africa’s Least Developed Countries (LDCs), including Benin, Burkina Faso, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger and Togo.

The goal of the proposed program is to create a market for investments in solar technology and aims to incentivize and leverage private sector players based in these countries, to scale up private investment in these technologies.

The project features two main objectives with interrelated components including the scaling up of commercial and sustainable financing for solar investments through senior debt and standby loans and developing technical capacity of private and public sector actors and raise awareness about the benefits of solar technologies.

Listed as the seventh United Nations Sustainable Development Goal, affordable and clean energy generation has picked up traction in the last few years with the reduction of project costs and higher affordability of equipment.

4 March 2019