Transcript
Richard Matey: My name is Richard Matey, I'm the coordinator for the Alliance for Empowering Rural Communities, a local NGO based in Ghana that works on energy, climate change issues in agriculture.
Interestingly, I never heard of the word export credit agencies. So a meeting was held, last year, early January, and they took us through what export credit finance is, what export credit agencies are, what do you do, and I was really enlightened. And I decided that let me also be part of this research work, let me know who these people really are.
So an export credit agency, some of them are private, others are state-owned , and they provide financing to domestic companies working overseas in the form of credit, insurance, loans, and sometimes they provide money directly to governments.
Now the issue with export credit agencies is that they become sort of a puppet or tools used by the developed nations to finance dirty energy abroad. So we have some big players like the UK Export Finance from the United Kingdom; we have JBIC from Japan; we have the Ex-Im Bank of China, there are quite many. And all these ones I've mentioned have provided money for either large hydro dams or fossil fuel projects in Africa. For example, in Uganda, UK Export Credit Finance has provided money for the Kabaale International Airport and this airport has displaced over 7,000 people and the people who are displaced are subsistence farmers who have lost their lands due to such construction.
In their respective countries, they are not invested in fossil fuels. So is it because Africa has become a dumping site, so they want to push down fossil fuel on us, whereas they could have invested in cleaner forms of energy, where we benefit from it and it would be value for money?
These dirty fuels do not come cheap for us. Ghana as a country hasn't benefited much from the oil that we produce, the revenues in which we get compared to the revenues that are made by these companies.
At the COP, we held a side event on aligning export finance to the Paris Agreement, calling for a phasing out of fossil fuel. And a day after our side event, certain countries and institutions committed to stop providing overseas export finance on fossil fuel projects by 2022. So we think it's a big win for us. Now what we are looking at from here is to ensure that this commitment materializes.
Export credit agencies are the worst of public financiers, providing support for dirty energy, which has negative impacts on communities. So it becomes critical for us to throw more light onto their work so that people get to know who they are and what they do.
Africa is most vulnerable to climate change impacts. As Africa, we need to develop a fossil fuel exit strategy, because definitely there will come a time where we may not have such investment in Africa, and what are we doing to ensure that we become energy sufficient, and also help in mitigating the climate impacts that we are experiencing?
Music: “Do Good” by Sindon