Biden’s climate diplomacy mustn’t turn a blind eye to Big Oil’s “dirty footprints” in Africa

March 15, 2021By Chairman OkoloiseBlog Post, Deep Dive, Featured

When President Joe Biden signed his first set of Executive Orders on Climate Change and cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline project soon after his inauguration, he sent a very clear message to the global fossil fuel industry: it’s no longer going to be business-as-usual with fighting the existential threat that climate change poses to humanity.

Distributed Funds for Distributed Renewable Energy: Ensuring African Energy Access Finance Reaches Local Actors

July 21, 2020By OCI TeamBriefings, Featured, Resources, Stop Funding Fossils 1 Comment

Communities in Africa have generally contributed the least to climate change, been undermined the most by international trade and finance policies, and have a right to better international support for distributed renewable energy. In order to reach universal energy access before the 2030 target set by the UN Sustainable Development Goals, international public finance institutions have an urgent responsibility to provide more funding and better financial transparency and tracking for distributed renewable energy. Additionally, they have a responsibility to foster local participation in and ownership of distributed renewable energy initiatives. This briefing provides recommendations for how international public finance institutions can fulfill this responsibility, while revealing that from 2016 to 2018, fossil fuels received more than 3.5 times the support than all kinds of renewable energy did during this period.

Briefing: Overseas players should not dominate distributed renewable energy sector in Africa

July 21, 2020By OCI TeamBlog Post, News, Press Releases, Stopping Carbon Lock-In

A new briefing released by Oil Change International details how the growth of distributed renewable energy in Africa has so far failed to include locally-owned companies and initiatives. The sector has been growing rapidly since 2013 — especially for companies focused on “pay-as-you-go” solar home systems — but finance has overwhelmingly only been accessible for multinational companies that are based in Europe or North America or led by entrepreneurs from these regions, meaning profits are largely not remaining in Africa.