By Asmau Ahmad
The Board of Directors of the African Development Fund (ADF) has approved a $2 million technical assistance grant to fund research that will contribute to electricity reforms in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).
The grant from the ADF, the concessional window of the African Development Bank Group (AfDB), will go to the ECOWAS Regional Electricity Regulatory Authority.
The ultimate goal is to stimulate cross-border electricity trade and improve access to energy in the 15 countries of the region.
The project has five components. The first is to select the electricity regulatory principles and key performance indicators from the main report Electricity Regulation Index for Africa of the AfDB, which will be adopted by the ECOWAS Regional Electricity Regulation Authority.
As part of this component, the project will develop the capacity in member countries to collect and report on these indicators on a common platform.
The second component will involve conducting a study to update a comparative analysis of electricity tariffs and their underlying drivers along the ECOWAS electricity value chain.
The third involves the development of a centralized database management system that will provide a platform to digitally collect relevant energy information from member countries, store it and disseminate it on a common digital platform.
The fourth component will assess and identify project bottlenecks and risks in ECOWAS member countries and recommend a consistent approach to progressively address basic barriers to investment in the electricity sector in the pre- and post-market phases. regional electric.
The final component focuses on program management and capacity building, which will be co-financed with the Regional Electricity Regulatory Authority. All components of the project will include data disaggregated by gender.
“Ultimately, this project will facilitate regional electricity trade and help improve access to electricity,” said Solomon Sarpong, project team leader at the African Development Bank.
“It will address the main causes of fragility, such as infrastructure bottlenecks, youth unemployment, environmental challenges, gender inequalities and regional development imbalances.”
Established on May 28, 1975 through the Lagos Treaty, ECOWAS is a regional organization that promotes economic integration in the constituent countries.
The ECOWAS consists of 15 countries, including Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo. Covering around 6.1 million km2, ECOWAS has an estimated population of 360 million people.
