Renewable Energy Cooperation Programme in Africa with the EU Energy Initiative Partnership Dialogue Facility (EUEI PDF).
The Africa-EU Renewable Energy Cooperation Programme (RECP) managed by the EUEI PDF is one of the most important international collaboration programmes in the energy access field. It is designed to support the rapid acceleration of low carbon transitions in Africa, as well as to promote investment in the capacity of key African stakeholders. It is imperative that the TEA programme develops alongside and in complementarity to the European cooperation programme. The LCEDN and the EUEI PDF work closely together to achieve this, for example through the LCEDN playing an active role in the scientific committee of the RECP. In addition, we collaborate in the development of joint activities where TEA and other UK-funded research initiatives can be more fully integrated into the technical cooperation and market development activities facilitated by the RECP.
More specifically, the partnership between the LCEDN and EUEI PDF involves the following activities.
1. Supporting RE skills development and employment in Africa – This involves actively engaging with the RECP’s work with the Pan-African Institute of Water and Energy Sciences (joint webinars; virtual student interactions; workshops) as well as other universities. Together with work in a couple of specific countries involving direct collaborations with DFID local offices.
2. Promoting Africa-EU RE research cooperation and science to practice – this involves a direct role in organising and implementing the second Africa-EU research and innovation symposium as well as inputs into the organization of science and business slams, side events at conferences and trainings addressing innovation and entrepreneurship in African businesses and universities.
3. Thematic research addressing innovations in skills development for RE- this involves supporting other RECP activity promoting knowledge sharing and skills development for RE in Africa through dialogue and exchanges between African, UK and EU training and education institutions as well as other stakeholders. We see two particular foci for this activity (drawing on two of the LCEDN themes identified at the start of section five above) which would each culminate in RECP organised events or feed into the second symposium. These themes are: (a) Enhancing the capacity of local governance and (b) the development of standards for a variety of different scales of RETs – involving consideration of ease of maintenance, local value added, waste and sustainability.
4. Mapping Knowledge: Much of our existing international partnership building has revealed a lack of knowledge of what research is being conducted where. This works in both directions, for example European researchers are unaware of the work of UK scholars and vice versa. We have already done some significant work on mapping UK research capacity but we propose to extend this by mapping where UK research expertise fits into the European portfolio and updating and extending the capacity of the lcedn.com website to track European (as well as UK research capacity) and making this knowledge more widely available. This would involve updating, extending and redesigning our Expertise Database and mapping facilities on lcedn.com to reflect research on a global basis.
The Africa-EU Renewable Energy Cooperation Programme:
The Africa-EU Renewable Energy Cooperation Programme (RECP) is a multi-donor programme that supports the development of markets for renewable energy in Africa. It was launched by more than 35 African and European Ministers and Commissioners under the Africa-EU Energy Partnership (AEEP). By catalysing the development of African renewable energy markets, the RECP contributes to such goals as: (a) promoting access to energy supporting sustainable economic growth and poverty eradication, within a sustainable development path; (b) developing value chains providing employment opportunities for men and women and business opportunities for African and European businesses; (c) enhancing energy security and mitigating the impacts of volatile fossil fuel prices and (d) encouraging climate change mitigation by substituting fossil fuels, and climate change adaptation by enhanced energy value chain and energy system resilience. The EU Energy Initiative Partnership Dialogue Facility (EUEI PDF) is responsible for the implementation of the RECP and is currently funded by Austria, the European Commission, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden.