By Alex Emeje
Abuja
Better days are in the offing for Nigeria as it joins other African countries to benefit from the United States initiative of increasing generation capacity by 10,000 megawatts.
The initiative, termed Power Africa and pioneered by Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), which plans to double access to electricity in sub-Saharan Africa has drawn new investments to the region.
“We are seeing developers investing for the first time in power in emerging markets. We are seeing developers we have never seen before. We are also seeing with the private sector in Africa an opportunity to partner with American companies”, said Mimi Alemayehon.
Alemayehonsays the OPIC mobilizes private capital to help solve critical challenges in developing countries.President Barrack Obama announced the power Africa initiative in June 13 last year.
Though a public- private approach, Power Africa wants to increase generation capacity by about 10,000 megawatts in six partner countries. The partner countries are -Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, and Tanzania and others in Africa where they identified lack of stable power supply as a militating factor to economic growth.
Alemayehon said that with a combined population of 800 million people, the countries of sub- Saharan Africa use the same power capacity as does Spain, with a populationof 45 million.
She explained that OPIC has committed $1.5 billion to Power Africa for its first five years while MCC has committed around $1billion to the initiative. USAID, it was learnt will provide $285 million in technical assistance, grants and risk mitigation to assist private sector energy transactions and help governments adopt policy and regulatory reforms to attract private investment.
