Invest in South Africa – The month of August 2022 has kicked off with South Africa welcoming a delegation of US investors with more than $1 trillion of assets under management who are looking for renewable energy investment opportunities.
The US government’s initiative to increase trade and investment between African nations and America, started Tuesday and is being facilitated by USAID and Prosper Africa. The investment visit is taking place in conjunction with the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken. Blinken will arrive in South Africa on Sunday, 07 August 2022, which will be his second official trip to Africa. From South Africa, the delegation will also be traveling to visit the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda.
According to a report released in May 2022, “South Africa, the world’s 13th-biggest source of greenhouse gases, will need to spend $250 billion over the next three decades to fund the closing down of coal-fired plants and development of replacement green energy such as wind and solar”. The world’s richest nations at COP26 in Glasgow in November 2021 pledged a total of $8.5 billion in climate grants and concessional loans to invest in South Africa.
Senior investment adviser for Prosper Africa, Cameron Khosrowshahi, highlighted two challenges that South Africa is currently facing in the transition towards green energy:
- “There’s not enough public resources in donor budgets and in local budgets, for example, in South Africa to solve the climate crisis,”
- “There’s going to need to be a scaling up of private capital alongside public capital in order to meet the challenge.”
The delegation consists of representatives from pension funds, financial institutions and asset managers including Bank of New York Mellon Corp., Kansas City Public School Retirement System, and the NYC Board of Education Retirement System. The party plans to meet with fund managers and discuss blended finance opportunities for South Africa’s transition to renewable energy as well as women’s economic empowerment.
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