Public-private partnerships will spur sustainable financing in Nigeria – Experts

Active public-private partnerships would promote long-term sustainable finance in Nigeria, some industry experts have said.

“The approach to addressing Nigeria’s expanding sustainable funding gap is to actively engage in infrastructural development through public-private partnerships,” Robo Igbu, a climate finance consultant, said.

Igbu shared this perspective during a panel discussion on Sustainable Financing in Nigeria on October 20 at the 10th West African Clean Energy & Environment Trade Fair and Conference (WACEE) 2022 in Lagos.

He said: “In a recent research by the Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) which showed where Nigeria stands, you will notice this huge gap.

“In Nigeria, public and private capital invested an average of $1.9 billion per year in climate-related initiatives in 2019/2020,” he said. “This is barely 11 percent of the anticipated $17.7 billion needed each year to reach the conditional Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) objective of lowering emissions by 47 percent below business-as-usual by 2030.”

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According to the World Bank, sustainable financing is the process of taking into account environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues when making investment decisions, resulting in longer-term investments in sustainable economic activities and projects.

Eme Kponu, USAID’s energy market development advisor, contributed to the conversation on sustainable financing options, saying, “You have to look at the aspects that prohibit investors from financing this project, such as limited historical data.

She said: “We discovered that because there is inadequate data on the impacts of earlier projects, investors find it difficult to commit to sponsoring future projects.”

In the addition, Daniel Adedokun, head of Geocycle, Lafarge Africa, noted in his contribution that the cement industry is one of the majorpolluters in the world due to raw material and energy needs, but that most cement companies are making up for this by switching to clean energy for their energy needs.

“In Nigeria, we have some power plants that don’t even have gas to power them, whereas, the cement sector is one of the largest consumers of natural gas today,” Adedokun said.

“We can transition the cement industry away from natural gas towards energy generated from waste that we dump everywhere. However, there needs to be a public infrastructure that supports this, but all we do in waste management today is dumping.”

“Right now, we’re looking at decarbonizing the entire industry, which cannot happen without the public’s help and the participation of other private investors,” he concluded.