Green groups push back on fossil gas funding as AfDB welcomes new head

As the Annual Meetings of the African Development Bank (AfDB) took place this week in the Ivory Coast, civil society campaigners called on the bank to stop funding gas – but a senior official told Climate Home the bank will continue to back the fossil fuel as needed to support intermittent sources of renewable electricity.

On the sidelines of the meetings in Abidjan, environmental campaigners criticised the bank’s decision not to exempt investments in gas from its energy sector policy and called on it to exclude gas projects in Mission 300 – a joint initiative of the AfDB and World Bank launched last year to connect 300 million Africans to electricity by 2030.

“We should be doing all that we can to help Africa leapfrog [to renewables] and not dive deeper into the gas era,” said Greenwatch policy advisor Anja Gebel at a side event organised by Power Shift Africa.

Echoing this call, after the election of Mauritania’s Ould Sidi Tah as the bank’s next president, civil society groups in a statement said the new president should institute “a comprehensive ban on fossil fuel financing by the AfDB, including gas”.

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But Wale Shonibare, AfDB’s director for energy financial solutions, policy and regulations, does not see the bank’s funding of gas ending soon. He said the bank will continue its backing for gas because it will serve as a transition fuel.

He said that, in some parts of the continent, gas can cheaply provide the necessary baseload – meaning a consistent supply of electricity – to support solar and wind power, whose electricity generation varies. “When the sun is not shining, what happens? So you need baseload that will be there all the time,” he told Climate Home.

Shonibare noted that the grid is a controlling factor, and countries must assess how much renewable energy their infrastructure can handle. He gave the example of Chad, saying its grid capacity is only about 150 megawatts.

“I cannot put more than 30 megawatts of renewables on the grid, otherwise it’s going to destabilise the grid,” he said, adding that baseload from gas or hydropower is necessary to balance supply.

The AfDB has made it clear that it will no longer finance coal, Shonibare said. But, he added, “we have never said that we will never do any fossil – but when we do fossil we are going to justify that that’s the best and least-cost solution for the countries at the time.” For now, it is impractical for Africa to go straight from fossil fuels to renewables, he added.

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Europe’s gas station

Rajneesh Bhuee, Stop Funding Gas Campaign manager at the NGO Recourse, said the AfDB promotes fossil gas as the least-cost solution due to its readily available reserves on the continent, but in reality, these countries are not tapping into those reserves for local consumption.

“There is no country on the continent that you can point out and say that has invested in gas that is using that gas for local consumption. There is this narrative that Africa is becoming Europe’s gas station because we are continuously exporting gas,” she told Climate Home.

She warned that fossil gas threatens countries’ climate goals, locks them into long-term dependence on fossil fuels and deepens debt crises in these countries “because they are investing into a resource that in the next 10 to 15 years will no longer have a market”.

Bhuee’s Recourse, which developed a fact sheet alongside other civil society groups, found that while the AfDB reached a significant milestone in 2024 with no fossil-fuel project funding approved, the bank’s classification of high-carbon fossil gas as a “transition fuel” leaves the door open for backsliding to more fossil investments in the future.

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The fact sheet recommended that the AfDB should exclude gas from Mission 300 and step up the phase-out of fossil fuel investments by changing the bank’s energy sector policy to exclude all fossil fuels including gas, from future investments.

Ould Tah backs fossil fuels

Environmental groups want the new AfDB president to take this forward and pave a new path for the continent’s energy future by shifting toward 100% renewables.

Fiza Naz Qureshi, gas campaigner at Big Shift Global Campaign, said Ould Tah must show “bold leadership that breaks from fossil fuel dependency”, adding that continued support for gas – including through Mission 300 and clean cooking initiatives – “risks locking communities, especially women, into harmful energy systems”. 

But the Mauritanian appears to support a different approach to Africa’s energy future. In an interview with Africanews, he said the continent can thrive by using “all available energy resources to support economic growth”.

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In a separate interview with The Africa Report, Ould Tah said the bank has the capacity to do more, as currently it approves much less funding annually than other multilateral banks, which he finds concerning considering Africa’s vast infrastructure gaps and the urgency of meeting the Sustainable Development Goals.

However, his ambitions to increase funding may face stiff challenges. The global breakdown in multilateral cooperation and a proposed reduction in support from the United States threaten to constrain the bank’s ability to expand. Just last month, Washington proposed a $555 million cut to the AfDB’s African Development Fund which supports the continent’s poorest countries.

In light of this, the bank is turning to innovative mechanisms like carbon markets to raise financing for climate action and energy security. At the Annual Meetings, the AfDB launched an Africa Carbon Support Facility which officials say will help countries develop policies and regulations to govern carbon trading. The aim is to make carbon credits a tradable commodity on Africa’s stock exchanges, according to Reuters.

Affirming this commitment, Kevin Kariuki, AfDB’s vice president for power, energy, climate change and green growth, said that “carbon market development is an imperative for the continent”.