Decarbonisation projects are crucial and essential for combating climate change in Africa, as they reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming, thereby preventing irreversible climate impacts and ensuring a sustainable future. By transitioning to clean energy and improving efficiency, these projects not only mitigate climate change but also offer significant benefits, including improved air quality, better public health, economic growth through green jobs, enhanced energy security and greater economic resilience.
From land restoration to EVs
Leading success stories on the African continent vary from the Great Green Wall Initiative for land restoration across the Sahel region (11 countries are officially part of the Pan-African Agency of the Great Green Wall (PAGGW): Burkina Faso, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan and Chad), the Lake Turkana Wind Power project (Kenya) and the Impu Wind Farm (South Africa) for renewable energy, the Olkaria II Geothermal Expansion (Kenya) for clean energy generation and the Egyptian Vehicle Scrapping and Recycling Programme for sustainable transport.
Other areas for potential projects include developing electric vehicle infrastructure, promoting sustainable agriculture and fostering local manufacturing of renewable energy technologies.
Cookstoves
Efficient cookstove projects are popular decarbonisation tools because they often have direct impact on rural communities’ lives by reducing fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions by improving energy efficiency and promoting fuel switching. These projects lead to lower consumption of biomass like firewood, which reduces pressure on forests and lowers carbon dioxide emissions, while also mitigating indoor air pollution and providing socio-economic benefits such as health improvements and time savings for households.
Distribution to 950,000 households
In 2023, TASC, an award-winning and pioneering carbon finance project developer with a proven track record of innovative climate mitigating techniques and investing in local communities, won the Environmental Finance Voluntary Carbon Market Award for its cookstove project.
“The award and the associated finance mechanism via Standard Bank were instrumental,” says Shelley Estcourt, TASC’s CEO for Africa. “It enabled us to repay early-stage funding and significantly expand the scope of the programme. To date, we’ve distributed clean cookstoves to over 950,000 households across rural South Africa, with benefits for both community health and carbon reductions.”
TASC’s current GRASS* project directly tackles the consequences of climate change by restoring degraded rangelands, boosting carbon sequestration, and building long-term resilience for rural communities.
* Grassland Restoration and Stewardship in South Africa
Escourt: “Climate change has significantly reduced the adaptive capacity of farmers, which sees them to increased drought vulnerability, erosion, bare soils, and more extreme weather impacts. GRASS helps reverse these effects by improving water-holding capacity, stabilising soil temperatures, reducing erosion, and increasing biodiversity across hundreds of thousands of hectares.” [Read full interview here.]
Bearing the brunt
However, decarbonisation projects in Africa face significant challenges including inadequate infrastructure, especially for renewable energy and electrification; limited access to finance, with high costs of capital deterring investors; reliance on fossil fuels for industrialisation and energy, leading to potential disruption of economies; skills gaps and policy and regulatory uncertainty, which creates investment risks.
Currently, Africa receives only an estimated 3% to 5% of global climate finance, despite bearing a disproportionate burden of the climate crisis and having a significant need for decarbonisation and adaptation.
UNDP Africa Sustainable Finance Hub
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Africa Sustainable Finance Hub is working with governments across Africa to solve their climate finance challenges.
“How is it possible that in 2025, when we are able to send people to the moon, when we are able to create driverless vehicles, we’ve not been able to solve the problem of cooking energy in Africa’s rural areas?” asks Maxwell Gomera, Resident Representative of UNDP South Africa and Director of the Africa Sustainable Finance Hub.
He continues: “This is something that is within our means. High-integrity carbon markets can offer Africa a powerful tool to mobilise finance required to advance climate action and ensure fair benefits while driving sustainable and inclusive development.”
Carbon markets unlocking billions
“Africa no longer waits for promises to be kept—we act,” Mr Gomera adds. “Carbon markets can unlock billions in finance, strengthen our institutions, and accelerate both Agenda 2063 and the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C goal. At UNDP’s Africa Sustainable Finance Hub, we believe in a unified continent ready to harness this opportunity, own its solutions, and lead the global transformation towards resilience and prosperity.” [Read full interview here.]
AU key initiatives
The African Union’s decarbonisation efforts are guided by the Climate Change and Resilient Development Strategy and Action Plan (2022–2032), which aims to build resilience and leverage a green economy. Key initiatives include the development of a comprehensive Green Hydrogen Strategy to harness renewable energy potential, and the African Energy Efficiency Strategy (AfEES) to minimise energy waste and greenhouse gas emissions.
The African Union also promotes the Green Recovery Action Plan (GRAP) for sustainable economic recovery, and emphasises smart and climate-resilient infrastructure development to support the transition to a low-emission future.
AfDB support
The African Development Bank (AfDB) supports decarbonisation projects in Africa through various initiatives, including the Climate Action Window (CAW), the Desert to Power initiative for solar energy and partnerships for industrial decarbonisation. The AfDB Group has significantly increased climate finance, aims to mainstream climate considerations into all its projects and prioritises investments in renewable energy, energy efficiency and green hydrogen to accelerate Africa’s transition to a low-carbon development path and enhance energy security.
Countries learning from each other
“We need to scale carbon projects to make them work faster and involve the communities” says Heather McEwan, Regional Representative: Africa and the Middle East for Verra, a well-known carbon project verification organisation.
“I was recently at the West African Carbon Alliance and the East African Carbon Alliance, and countries will literally send delegations from one country to another to learn from each other, to learn how they are creating their policies, how they are addressing Article 6, how they are addressing their nationally determined indicators and contributions and how they can best capitalise on this market going forward.”
She continues: “I think that that’s really exciting to see this genuine interest, this genuine attempt to scale up these markets and a lot more policies coming out. My vision would be that we have lots of projects on the continent because also there’s a lot of those social benefits that get attached to that.” [Read full interview here.]
Click here to meet more inspiring people involved in decarbonisation projects on the continent.
Africa's Green Economy Summit connects industry professionals and organisations to information and each other in a carefully curated live environment. Its purpose is to support in mobilising investments for green projects to scale up and industrialisation, which will have a significant impact on environmental sustainability and economic growth.
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