Sierra Leone is one of 15 countries in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) that will benefit from an approved African Development Fund (https://bit.ly/3HXs6GI) technical assistance grant of $2 million US dollars to fund research that will contribute to electricity reforms in the region.
The benefiting ECOWAS countries include Benin, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo. The region covers about 6.1 million km2 and has an estimated population of 360 million people.
The fund confirmed on its website that its Board of Directors had, on Tuesday, June 28, 2022, approved the grant, which will go to the ECOWAS Regional Electricity Regulatory Authority, to carry out the reforms. The ultimate objective, according to the press release, is to stimulate cross-border electricity trade and improve energy access in the 15 countries in the region.
The Project Team Leader at the African Development Bank, Solomon Sarpong, said, "Ultimately, this project will facilitate regional trade and help improve access to electricity." He went on, "It will address major causes of fragility, such as infrastructure bottlenecks, youth unemployment, environmental challenges, gender inequalities, and regional development imbalances."
The project, according to the African Development Fund (https://bit.ly/3HXs6GI), has five components, including selecting electricity regulatory principles and key performance indicators from the African Development Bank’s flagship Electricity Regulatory Index for Africa (https://bit.ly/3OIAb4V) report, which is expected to be adopted by the ECOWAS Regional Electricity Regulatory Authority. This component will address the issue of capacity building in member countries as part of the project, for collecting and reporting on the indicators on a common platform.
The second component will involve conducting a study to update a comparative analysis of electricity tariffs and their underlying drivers across the electricity value chain of ECOWAS. The third involves developing a centralized database management system that will provide a platform for digitally collecting relevant energy information from member countries, sorting, and disseminating it on a common digital platform.
The fourth component of this project will assess and identify project bottlenecks and risks in ECOWAS member countries and recommend a coherent approach to progressively address ground-level barriers to investment in the power sector in pre-and post-establishment phases of the regional electricity market. The final component focuses on program management and capacity building, which will be co-financed with the Regional Electricity Regulatory Authority. All components of the project will include gender-disaggregated data.
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