Developing sustainable urban energy projects to help cities combat climate change

By 2050, Africa’s urban population is set to triple from 400 million to 1.2 billion inhabitants. Urbanization is one of Africa’s major challenges in addressing this densification. In rapidly growing cities, national and local authorities are seeking to develop resilient and low-carbon strategies to provide sustainable urban services to their population.

Following two call for projects phases, the European Union called on various partners, including AFD and Expertise France, for the implementation of the third phase of the Covenant of Mayors for Sub-Saharan Africa (CoM SSA III). 

Under the CoM SSA III initiative, AFD is focusing its action on preparing sustainable urban energy infrastructure projects with the potential to attract investments. For this purpose, it has a €2.5 million budget for prefeasibility studies and environmental, social and technical studies.

This fund may also be used to support the financial structuring of a project and anticipate its future operation and monitoring. The aim of financing these feasibility studies is for the projects to achieve a level of maturity to bring them in line with the international standards applied by AFD or other donors.

The thematic areas eligible for this fund concern renewable electricity generation, the renovation and creation of street lighting networks and energy efficiency in buildings. Waste-to-energy projects and projects promoting electric or biogas modes of transport are also accepted. The eligible project initiators may be private and public actors (ministries, cities, institutions and public banks). The city must be a signatory of the CoM SSA.

In Sub-Saharan African cities, the implementation of these projects will:

• Facilitate access to sustainable energy services for urban and peri-urban populations
• Contribute to the low-carbon development of the cities concerned 
• Increase the resilience of cities in a context of rapid urbanization.