As the mpox outbreak that has affected the Democratic Republic of the Congo and spread to neighbouring countries continues to grow, World Health Organization (WHO) is intensifying support to countries to scale up measures to curb the virus and save lives.

On the advice of independent experts of the International Health Regulations Emergency Committee, WHO Director-General has determined that the upsurge of mpox constitutes a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC). The emergence of a new strain of the mpox virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and its rapid spread, including to neighbouring countries, is one of the main reasons for the declaration of the PHEIC, the second such determination in two years relating to the disease.

So far this year, more than 2100 laboratory-confirmed cases and 13 deaths have been reported from 12 countries (Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa and Uganda) compared with 1145 confirmed cases and seven deaths in the whole of 2023 reported from 11 countries.

“We are hard at work on the frontlines of the response, collaborating closely with governments and communities to strengthen mpox control measures and are ramping up efforts to curb the widening trend of the virus through coordinated action with partners and national authorities,” said Dr Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for Africa.

WHO is stepping up support to the affected countries by deploying additional experts, including epidemiologists and anthropologists, and providing initial funding to accelerate outbreak response measures. Efforts are also underway to enhance cross-border collaboration for case investigation, contact tracing and community engagement to ensure compliance with preventive measures.

The Organization also supporting national regulatory authorities to speed up regulatory approvals, as well as providing guidance to national immunization technical advisory groups to ensure readiness for vaccine rollout.  WHO has triggered the process for Emergency Use Listing for mpox vaccines, which will accelerate vaccine access for lower-income countries which have not yet issued their own national regulatory approval. Emergency Use Listing also enables partners including Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and UNICEF to procure vaccines for distribution.

Efforts are also being ramped up to strengthen national diagnostic capacities by providing testing kits and reagents and machines to decentralize testing. Genomic sequencing is also ongoing to determine the mpox clades.

To enhance preparedness in countries neighbouring the Democratic Republic of the Congo and those at risk, disease surveillance and training of frontline health workers is being stepped up as well as public awareness campaigns.

Caused by an Orthopoxvirus, mpox was first detected in humans in 1970, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The disease is considered endemic to countries in central and west Africa. Mpox is transmitted from animals to humans. It can also spread from humans to humans through contact with bodily fluids, lesions on the skin or on internal mucosal surfaces, such as in the mouth or throat, respiratory droplets and contaminated objects.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of WHO Regional Office for Africa.

With ambitious plans to increase Nigeria’s oil output, indigenous energy company Platform Petroleum Chairman Dumo Lulu-Briggs recently announced that he is looking to invest as much as $1 billion in the country’s oil and gas industry. The company is also upgrading its flow station capacity at the Egbaoma field – situated on OML 38 in the Niger Delta Basin – from 3,000 barrels of oil per day (bpd) to 10,000 bpd and from 30 million standard cubic feet of natural gas to 60 million standard cubic feet per day by 2025.

In light of this ambitious target, Platform Petroleum will serve as a Silver Sponsor during this year’s African Energy Week (AEW): Invest in African Energy 2024 conference – taking place in Cape Town from November 4-8. During the event, Platform Petroleum is expected to showcase opportunities to partners and investors in Nigeria’s marginal field development while highlighting enhanced gas recovery and monetization strategies. The conference will also serve as the premier platform for the company to seek new capital and technologies to further develop its strategies to bolster output.

AEW: Invest in African Energy is the platform of choice for project operators, financiers, technology providers and government, and has emerged as the official place to sign deals in African energy. Visit www.AECWeek.com for more information about this exciting event.

The Egbaoma field – operated by Platform Petroleum – serves as one of 24 marginal fields previously farmed out to indigenous oil companies in Nigeria. Since first oil production, the company has carried out over nine workover operations, drilled three wells and executed two sidetracks – a testament to robust efforts to optimize the field’s production in joint partnership with oil and gas company Newcross Petroleum.

Under its planned 2024 bid round, Nigeria is placing a strong emphasis on marginal assets, which offer the potential to boost efficiency in the sector, bring new resources online and diversify the country’s exploration landscape. Nigeria’s previous marginal licensing round in 2020 featured 57 fields, of which the largest 25 are expected to generate over $9 billion of investment in their first five years of operation and over $38 billion in lifetime revenue.

Responsible for over 85% of Nigeria’s export earnings and 30% of budget revenues, the country’s oil and gas sector is critical to its economy. As such, Nigeria’s government has sought to revitalize the industry by restructuring fiscal terms, institutional frameworks and regulatory policies to attract investment and boost efficiency, with a prime focus on promoting indigenous oil and gas companies to boost local content development and value addition.

“Improving the participation of local companies in Nigeria’s oil and gas sector will assuredly enhance energy independence across the country while upskilling the workforce and boosting local content development. As Nigeria moves to alleviate energy poverty through domestic petroleum products, companies such as Platform Petroleum will be central for enhancing oil recovery and resource monetization across the country. Their participation at AEW 2024 is a testament to the capacity of Nigeria’s local producers,” stated African Energy Chamber Executive Chairman NJ Ayuk.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of African Energy Chamber.

By Ana Hajduka, founder and CEO of Africa GreenCo (www.AfricaGreenCo.com).

As Africa’s energy sector deregulates, exciting opportunities open up for financial innovation to benefit consumers. Private-sector buyers and traders can mitigate default risk and provide certified green energy at lower cost, writes Ana Hajduka, founder and CEO of Africa GreenCo.

Africa’s renewable energy potential is undeniable, but it remains largely untapped. The problem is that the financing landscape for renewable energy and other projects in Africa was previously reliant on state utilities as buyers.

The scale of projects that could be financed in a country were then limited by the fiscal capabilities of that country and the sovereign guarantees it could provide.

This traditional model of relying on countries to provide such guarantees has faced recent challenges, because of increasing debt burdens, and shifting economic priorities.

Opportunities have therefore emerged for innovative financial approaches that will ensure more guarantees can be acquired from other sources and that risk can be diversified across a portfolio of suppliers and customers.  This would see more projects achieving financial close, to ultimately provide more African people with clean energy.

There is also room to not only grow new renewable energy supply, but to create new renewable energy markets on the continent, where that supply can be sold.

As a consequence, the market is opening up to allow alternative buyers of new renewable energy, which can utilize existing regional competitive energy markets to diversify its risks – buyers such as GreenCo.

This is extremely relevant at the moment. Legislation like South Africa’s Electricity Regulation Amendment Bill, is set to open up the electricity sector to new supply and trading models. This foreshadows the opening of a competitive spot market for electricity trade in South Africa – linking in the future the South African spot market with that of the Southern African Power Pool.

Namibia did something similar a couple of years ago, as did Zambia.

These regulatory market developments are important as they facilitate innovation and new private sector business models through which there can be a scale up of bankable offtake agreements for new supply. The problem in the region is not lack of projects. It’s not lack of funding. It’s earning enough lender trust to lend on the back of a  20-25 year power purchase agreement backed by a private sector buyer without state fiscal support.  

Transmission capacity

Transmission constraints are another factor in this emerging scenario. The development of the electricity sector across the region effectively has a ceiling, determined by the available transmission network for new generation.

Previously, development finance institutions would only fund state utilities, and then only when it was proved that sufficient generation would be coming on board to utilize any new transmission infrastructure.

Now, thanks to the growing liberalisation focus in the region, allowing new private sector participants to buy and trade power, these transmission funding inflows can be facilitated. This new supply will be critical to making new transmission investments bankable.

If the private sector can sufficiently guarantee that any proposed new capacity coming on board will utilise the necessary transmission infrastructure, that new capacity effectively backs the viability of the new transmission investing – bringing a direct value add to the state utilities in South Africa and the rest of the SADC region.

Regulatory readiness

But for all of this to fall into place, we need a convergence of the relevant regulatory readiness – and we are already seeing this across the region. In many SADC countries, new legislation is providing the regulatory clarity that the private sector requires to venture into supply, transmission and trade.

The entire ecosystem must work for new entrants, and lenders. Until now, lenders have seldom considered state utilities to be creditworthy, and they have required significant fiscal guarantees to cover the power-purchase obligations of those utilities.

That model is a double whammy. Not only does it encumber utilities with debt for new generation, but it hits the national fiscus as well.

In South Africa, for example, the widely respected REIPPP process has brought online a significant amount of new generation. However, once the South African government started reporting on the process in accordance with IMF fiscal transparency regulations, this added an additional 36% to the contingent liabilities of the national treasury – almost $15 billion – overnight. That is money that can no longer be channeled into education, health and other key infrastructure development (water, transmission etc).

The REIPPP model has been extremely successful in the electricity sector, but it has perhaps outlived its usefulness. There are other priorities, and the private sector should be sufficiently capable to deliver on its own, with the lending community partnering accordingly.

The REIPPP model can be replicated in cases such as storage tenders, and in the transmission space. While transmission is usually considered a government function, it would certainly be possible to incentivize the private sector – and lenders – to enter the space.

New licensees

Across the region, markets are liberalising rapidly. South Africa has shown it can happen almost overnight, as in the case of the country’s generation regulations. This has allowed third-party wheeled projects, from generators directly to customers, and facilitated new license applicants in the market such – such as GreenCo.

This shows how market thinking about the development of the electricity sector has fundamentally changed. There is collaboration like never before.

For GreenCo, events like the forthcoming AOW event offer opportunities to align with mining, commercial and industrial offtakers, as well as suppliers and IPPs. For an entity like ours, it’s also a chance to show potential customers and suppliers the bankability of our own offtake; that lenders have confidence in our power purchase agreements.

Financial innovation must happen in a way that makes lenders comfortable. What that looks like in our case is that all our payment obligations are backed by an internationally AA- credit rated guarantee provider GuarantCo.

We are entering the South African market operationally ready to supply customers within South Africa and outside; and with financial readiness in the form of innovative guarantee structures to be considered bankable in the market.

The ultimate beneficiaries of this financial innovation must be the consumers. Many are looking to decarbonise their operations – for climate change reasons, and to make their products competitive on international markets.

Affordability is another key consideration. In our case, by being able to provide sufficient operational and financial risk mitigation to the lenders of the generators that supply to us, we can supply electricity far more affordably.

Around 70% of the costs of a generation or renewable energy project is from the cost of debt. Therefore, the more bankable an offtaker is, the lower the debt costs, and the cheaper the electricity – a clear demonstration of the benefits of financial innovation for the end consumer.

AOW: Investing in African Energy unites industry leaders to develop policy, share discoveries, secure investment, and shape Africa’s energy future. The event runs from October 7 – 11 at the CTICC.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of AOW: Investing in African Energy.

About GreenCo: 
GreenCo is a renewable energy buyer and trader operating in Southern Africa (Zambia, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia); purchasing power from renewable energy generators and selling that electricity to utilities, private sector offtakers (i.e. commercial and industrial users), national power trading markets and to the competitive markets of the Southern African Power Pool (SAPP). GreenCo is an active trader on SAPP and holds a number of applicable licenses covering its operations within the Southern African region. Through its activities, GreenCo will increase the supply of, and demand for, finance for energy projects, and mobilise private sector capital more quickly towards critical and transformative capacity addition. For more information please see: www.AfricaGreenCo.com

President His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan has sent a message of congratulations to President Denis Sassou Nguesso of Republic of the Congo, on the occasion of his country’s Independence Day.

His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai; and His Highness Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Vice President, Deputy Prime Minister and Chairman of the Presidential Court, sent similar messages to President Nguesso and Prime Minister Anatole Collinet Makosso on the occasion.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of United Arab Emirates Ministry of Foreign Affairs&International Cooperation.