Energy and Natural Resources

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The theme of this year’s African Development Bank (AfDB) meetings, which ran from May 23rd to the 27th, was timely and necessary: “Energy and Climate Change.” In the first day of the meetings, AfDB President Akinwumi Adesina announced the AfDB Group agenda for the continent’s economic transformation, which includes The New Deal on Energy for…

In the last week of February, Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe announced that all privately owned diamond mines would be nationalized and taken over by the newly created state-owned Zimbabwe Consolidated Diamond Co. The move affected six primarily Chinese companies. This decision is in keeping with the larger nationalization plan for mines that the President announced…

Early last month, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) caught the attention of investors when it issued a report predicting that Mozambique’s average economic growth rate between 2021-2025 could reach as high as 24 percent per annum and liquefied natural gas projects (LNG) could reach more than 50 percent of the country’s nominal output by the…

New African Development Bank President Akinwumi Adesina chose last week’s World Economic Forum at Davos for the official launch of the Bank’s New Deal on Energy for Africa, along with a Transformative Partnership for Energy in Africa (TPEA).  While a candidate for the AfDB president position a year ago, Adesina placed energy at the top…

Much no doubt will be written about how 195 nations came together in Paris to make a global commitment to tackle climate change and what changes in regulation and the investment landscape might result. From my vantage point in Paris during the negotiations, a few key impressions stand out.

First, the agreement overcomes those past…

As the UNFCCC’s twenty-first Conference of Parties (COP) gets underway in Paris today to negotiate a post-2020 international climate treaty, it is time to recognize that African countries have come a long way in the global climate negotiations process. In the earlier days, climate change was portrayed as a scientific problem for so-called “developed” countries…

The African continent is revolutionizing itself as the place where no infrastructure is no problem.  This began in the telecommunications field: Africa lacks a robust system of landlines, which traditionally enable better access to desktop computers, online services, and financial institutions.  But the emergence of cellular telephony has allowed individuals across Africa to bypass…

After months of speculation and mounting pressure, it’s finally here: the government of Nigeria has released the long-awaited PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) forensic audit of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), the country’s national oil company. It’s not often that the release of a highly technical accounting report makes the headlines—much less grabs the attention of…

Background

On April 14, 2015, the Committee on International Trade (INTA) of the European Parliament adopted amendments (by 22 votes to 16, and 2 abstentions) on the European Commission’s proposal for an EU conflict minerals regime published in March 2014. The INTA vote followed a compromise reached among three of the main political groups of…