Mark Howells speaks at UNECA Capacity Building Event at COP29

On 19 November, UNECA (United Nations Economic Commission for Africa) held a high-level meeting in partnership with CCG on Building Capacity in Energy Modelling and Long-term Energy Investments for Africa’s Climate Action. In part it was a celebration of how far the capacity-building side of CCG’s work has come, thanks to UNECA and so many other partners. But its main purpose was to showcase a methodology that delivers results and empowers academics and Ministry teams across the Global South, to take control of their energy modelling and planning for the future.

Linus Mofor of UNECA, introduced Mark Howells with whom he has been working since COP21.  Mark recalled how when he had set up a forum in Europe to monitor energy development, Linus had asked him why there wasn’t one for Africa.  Since COP21 they had worked together with no budget to do this.  The goal of this Capacity Building project is to ‘increase agency and capacity in Africa’ which, rather than just increasing the skill level, ‘would create an ecosystem that allows African champions to drive the agenda into the future’. 

Mark continued: “We worked with the World Bank, IRENA, IAEA and a number of other partners to figure out the tools and methods that would be useful and would fit into technical cooperation programmes and finance mobilisation programmes.  If we got that right, it would help to link up analysts with decision markers faster.”  

Mark continued by referencing the Data-to-Deal framework: “The same tools have been used in Latin America where $10Billion of concessionary finance have been pulled together. Driven by academics in Latin America who were trained with government support.  Very much hands-off by ourselves but with high level champions.”  

“We have wonderful examples of Mauritius doing work on coal phase-out; Tunisia is working on integrating intermittent renewables and the same in Kenya.  We have some wonderful work coming out of Ghana where our colleagues from Africa are pushing the pace internationally and this is really, really important. Another point is that because we’ve chosen our partners and the structure and the principles that we operate by in the way that we have, this creates a platform for others to engage if they want.”

Mark mentioned that there are rules for engaging with the ecosystem so that the quality of teaching and outputs will be of the highest standard, but that it is open source and, with funding from any organisation, can scale up into any country. He recalled how at the start there were only two or three tracks of energy modelling training to choose from and now there are around 12 as the modelling approach gets applied to other aspects of long-term energy scenarios and their emissions implications, such as how to improve clean cooking.

He continued: “So, how do we get that finance mobilized in the African context? This is Africa-driven. This is the sixth instalment of our capacity-building activities. When we started, we had no funding so it’s really lovely to see this going on so widely now and gradually there is funding coming in to take it even wider. When we started, it was simply a labour of love, but the demand has been overwhelming. So that’s nice to see, as are the articles that are appearing in academic journals.

“There’s often a complaint that in Africa there are not that many articles in this space written in that peer-reviewed literature, which means that it’s very difficult to understand what African academia is thinking. But through this process, we’ve had our first special issue of a world-class journal come out, edited by Africans with African authors. We have a new one that’s coming out soon and we’ve already started to make a marked increase in the number of African-driven publications.

“We’re extremely privileged to be able to play a very small part in that. The other thing is that there is now a large number of people that have gone through the EMP schools, and we spend a lot of time talking to them afterwards to understand what it is that African analysts need into the future.

“So, again, rather than trying to make this up somewhere else, we work with analysts to figure out what it is that they want and our first response to this has been to create the Energy Modelling Community (EMC) to provide ongoing support. If it wasn’t for Linus and now lots of African centres that are driving this, this would not be growing. And it’s growing at a rate.

“So we’d just like to extend a special thank you to all of the partners that have been involved in putting this together with a forward-looking element where we want to empower Africans to break through the glass ceiling and play a full part in this ecosystem. And also I’d especially like to thank Linus and the team from the ECA who made this possible.”