Nairobi, Kenya, Oslo, Norway 7th September 2023 – “Africa has the potential to become a world leader in renewables and green growth”. ‘Kenya’s President Ruto’s´ message to the 2023 African Climate Summit (ACS), echoed by African Union Heads of State and UN Secretary-General Guterres’, calling for the immediate creation of Institutional Investor-Public Partnerships (IIPPs) to invest at scale and establish leading green industries, adding value to Africa’s mineral wealth and capturing an outsized share of the $10trn per annum and growing global green industrial economy.

Africa Investor CEO and Chairman of the Just Transition Investor Alliance (JTIA), Dr. Hubert Danso, offers a practical approach to implementing the ACS´ ambitions and objectives: A blueprint for ´Green Industrial Cities´(GIC).

“These carefully selected and interconnected special purpose, place based impact investment destinations, predominantly located in places dependent on mining and highly carbon intensive industries, will constitute an investable ´Green Energy Corridor´”, Dr. Danso shares in a comment. 

The Corridor for investments and solutions will open a gateway for customers seeking to procure finished green goods and technologies. The data driven approach to developing GICs proposed by Dr. Danso, leveraging catalytic technologies such as AI enabled  Digital Twins and advanced simulation, promises to speed up planning and procurement processes by as much as 15%, and ultimately de-risk the underwriting of industrial scale investments.

The methodology, which is currently being applied in both Europe and Africa, is co-developed with United Cities and the United Cities Sustainability Centre in Norway on the back of a partnership with JTIA announced earlier this year at the New Financial Pact Summit in Paris.

“African cities can use our methods to leapfrog their green transition. We are delighted to have found an approach that speaks to the needs of cities, as well as institutional investors”, says United Cities Director General, Ms. Kari Aina Eik.

The emerging Green Industrial Cities Alliance and the Green Energy Corridor is a powerful implementation platform for the Africa-EU Earthshot (AEE) launched at the ACS, drawing on the JTIA’s Just Transition Procurement Champions Community (JTPCC) of Large African companies and Global Corporations from across commercial and industrial sectors, SME’s, non-profit organizations, Aid organizations, as well as other buying agencies. operating globally and across the continent.

While recruitment of the first cohort of Green Industrial Cities is well underway, so are preparations for the next phase of the investment platform, to be announced during COP28 in Dubai in December and set to further bolster the Partnership for Renewables in Africa (APRA), accelerating the continent’s just energy transition and cementing Africa as the defacto renewable energy industrial superpower.