Empowering Urban Africa: Sustainable Energy Solutions for Sub-Saharan Cities
This virtual roundtable will bring together the foremost funders, implementers, Mayors and experts tackling the topic of increased access to sustainable energy in SSA. To date, over 44 cities committed to CoM SSA have received their Energy Access compliance badges; by doing so, these climate change champion cities have signalled their commitment to improving their residents' access to sustainable energy and have begun the journey to do so. During this session, CoM SSA Mayors will share their experiences planning and implementing sustainable energy access actions with leading funders and implementers of such actions in Africa. The session has four main objectives:
(1) To sound a clarion call at the biggest climate change event of 2023 with regards to how fundamental improved access to sustainable energy is for SSA, from a developmental, climate change adaptation and mitigation perspective.
(2) To unpack prevalent barriers and opportunities to ensure rapid scaling-up of sustainable energy access interventions that work.
(3) To co-develop a roadmap based on the experiences shared during the session and garnered prior to it, which can be used to inform how CoM SSA and similar flagship initiatives on the continent can take this important topic forward.
(4) To feed the African city perspective into COP28 processes (including the Urbanisation Ministerial) via the Local Governments and Municipal Authorities (LGMA) constituency (chaired by ICLEI) and in collaboration with the UN Climate Change High-Level Champion's city agendas.
An essential aspect related to the above will be deep consideration of how SSA cities, which are central to the climate crisis, can access increased resources for scaled and contextual sustainable energy access action.
