Six
months after U.S. President Barack Obama launched Power Africa, the interagency
team is still defining roles and creating strategies. Will its leaders find a
strategy that balances quick wins with long-term results?
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| Children study using a solar-powered lamp in Iringa Region, Tanzania. |
U.S.
government leaders involved in the Obama administration initiative to increase
energy access sub-Saharan Africa shared their thoughts on what they have
learned so far about the ambitious energy access and investment push.
The
clearest message to emerge from last week’s panel discussion was that the key
is “managing expectations.”
Officials
from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Overseas Private
Investment Corp., the Millennium
Challenge Corp. and Capitol Hill discussed at the Center for Global Development how their agencies’ unique
mandates and perspectives are contributing to a coordinated approach to combat
energy poverty on the continent.
The
big idea behind Power Africa is that it can draw on the entire U.S. government
“toolbox” when it looks at high-potential power deals that have become
road-blocked by political, regulatory, or business-related obstacles, and what
can be done to move them forward.
But
while supporters say the inter-agency “transactional” approach is the
initiative’s greatest strength, it also means it is subject to a wide range of
expectations, since each agency involved — not too mention the variety of
private investors and foreign government institutions — has a different mandate
and different set of constituents to please.
In
particular, Power Africa could face potential interagency conflicts between
those who want a lot of transactions to happen quickly and those who favor a
more long-term, systemic approach to power development.
Common
strategy
Power
Africa’s agency representatives will have to be clear with each other about an
inter-agency strategy for balancing individual power deals that keep Power
Africa’s public and private partners engaged with deeper structural changes and
reforms that take time, patience, and a willingness to wade through the slow,
political process of institutional capacity building.
USAID’s
Power Africa Coordinator Andy Herscowitz reported mostly positive progress in
the first six months, including what the agency calls a “landmark” deal last
September between the government of Ethiopia and Reykjavik Geothermal, a
US-Icelandic private developer, to construct the Corbetti geothermal plant, the
“first independent power project in Ethiopia’s history.”
But
Herscowitz also suggested the initiative’s first stage has seen the various
agencies continue to grapple with how to better “define their roles” with
respect to their fellow public and private partners.
USAID
has been criticized for a perceived overdependence on one-off initiatives. At
the same time, lack of access to energy is seen as a fundamental roadblock to a
wide array of development, education, and economic growth goals, which many of
the agencies involved in Power Africa have in common.
It
was evident from the panel that finding that balance will be important if the
initiative is going to ensure continued buy-in from its stakeholders. For
example, OPIC might be more interested in securing large, individual power
purchasing agreements quickly, since they were created with the “core mandate”
to facilitate U.S. investment abroad, said OPIC Executive Vice President Mimi
Alemayehou.
OPIC
measures success in part by the amount of investment leveraged across its
portfolio in a given year, and the agency has been singled out as one most
capable of actually delivering the transactions to reach Power Africa’s energy
access targets.
MCC
on the other hand says it is most concerned with establishing the longer-term
foundation for African governments to structure and complete their own power
deals after the initiative ends.
Kamran
Khan, MCC’s vice president for compact operations, noted that individual
transactions and infrastructure projects are “helpful,” but more because of
their positive incentives for regulatory and institutional changes than their
individual wattage achievements. Herscowitz likewise lauded the “demonstration
effect” individual transaction can have, noting the goals is, “not flipping the
switch but opening up the market.”
Coordination
a challenge
Ben Leo,
a long-time energy poverty advocate who moderated last week’s panel at the
Center for Global Development, expressed similar concerns that an overemphasis
on individual deals could make it hard to transition from the “transactional”
to the “structural.”
USAID
meanwhile has a challenging role to play by ensuring that each agency feels its
investments in powering Africa are achieving their expected results —
especially when those expected results vary between participants.
While
sometimes portrayed as a silver bullet, interagency coordination is never easy
and can get stalled or sidelined by competing mandates and rivalries — just ask
the Global Health Initiative. But the credibility of the U.S. aid
enterprise depends on the ability of an administration to name goals and
coordinate its resources to achieve them — as Obama promised to do with Power
Africa.
If
the Electrify Africa Act passes through Congress this year, as some expect it might, the number of spectators, voices,
opinions and targets will only increase.
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