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Participants at the
3rd Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Business Forum
in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, have asked the ECOWAS Commission to declare
a state of emergency and focus on the development of their energy
sectors, as a strategy to facilitate speedy regional development.

The state of emergency will be for a decade, to push governments in member states to work on the energy sector.

The forum, which
focused on the theme ‘Harnessing energy resources for the competiveness
of West Africa’s economy’, said these measures will enable the region
address the supply-side constraints hampering access to energy in the
region, where only 30 percent of the population have access to energy,
with demand expected to grow by 7.6 percent from 6,500 mega watts (MW)
in 2003, to 22,000 MW in 2020.

The measures
proposed at the forum were expected to help the region address the
challenge in a holistic manner through initiatives that will promote
energy self-sufficiency, address the business and policy environment
issues, as well as the project financing mechanism.

The proposal
reinforced calls for the expeditious implementation of the priority
projects of the West African Power Pool (WAPP) in the areas of power
generation and the interconnection of national grids, the adoption of a
regional energy mix that exploits all the region’s energy resources to
meet the fast growing demand, the development of minimum renewable
energy targets, as well as the strengthening of the Cape Verde-based
Centre for Renewable Energy (CRE).

Other proposals
will enable the region address the business and policy environment, and
calls for the creation of a regional framework to guarantee private
sector investment, the implementation of capacity building programmes,
the development and enforcement of local environmentally-friendly and
energy efficient materials, the unbundling of the energy sector to
private sector investors, the strengthening of mechanisms for public
private partnerships, and the ratification of the ECOWAS Energy
Protocol.

On ways to address
the fund constraints against investment in the sector, including ECOWAS
facilitation of donor support for such projects, participants suggested
the injection of funds in the rehabilitation of maintenance of existing
infrastructure, the mobilisation of local resources, and the
development of financing mechanisms for energy projects, particularly
for rural electrification, as well as the provision of incentives to
encourage investment in independent power projects.