Low Carbon Investment Initiative

For Nigeria where industrialization is relatively low, there is concern that its population growth rate has resulted in over 69 million young people and a population of over 170 million in less than two decades will need energy to sustain its current growth trajectory. Such growth should be driven by clean energy to ensure that the countries carbon footprint remains within a sustainable threshold of under 2 tonnes per capital.

In response to this urgency the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) partnered with several stakeholders including the Foundation for Partnerships Initiatives in the Niger Delta (PIND), Market Development in the Niger Delta (MADE), and Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) to tackle this issue. Collectively, a dialogue was organized at the Sustainability Policy Commission Break Out session on Low Carbon Investment for the Niger Delta at the 23^RD Nigerian Economic Summit of 2017 (NES#23). A kick-off meeting was then held in February 2018, after the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria endorsed the outcomes of the dialogue at NES#23 as captured in the Green Book on genuine approaches to improve Nigeria’s GDP growth in alignment with the Federal Government’s Economic Recovery and Growth Plan published in 2017.

At the kick-off meeting, which was attended by sixteen stakeholders representing the private sector, civil society and government, it was agreed that in this penultimate year to elections a six to nine month roll out plan would be needed to ensure delivery of at least one pilot initiative to decrease low carbon initiatives. Stakeholders also committed to creating a road map that would be developed using empirical data from PIND and others.

Others that supported the dialogue and initiative are the LPG Adoption Programme of the Office of the Vice President, United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Union Bank Plc., Nigerian Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL), Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA), Bank of Agriculture (BOA), Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), and several others in the private sector supporting with specialized skills for Clean Development Mechanism — a tool that provides for emission reduction projects that generate Certified Emission Reduction units, which may be traded in carbon reduction schemes — and ICT.

Stakeholders had earlier agreed that scaling delivery of clean power requires a consuming public who could sustain payment of un-subsidized and cost reflective tariffs for off-grid solutions, which means that power providers need viable consumers to offtake their services. Following that participants noted the ERGP 2017 suggested that clean and renewable power would enable critical sector value chain growth in agro-allied, construction, ICT, and trade. Finally, stakeholders agreed that new economic ecosystems where such sector value chains were inter-linked and embedded would bridge many of the gaps that have thus far precluded rapid and sustained growth. Therefore, the stakeholders resolved to have six working groups to develop separate but contiguous road maps and actions for the identified sectors.