By Annisa Essack
25:05:2022

Activists, including those from African countries, demonstrated outside African Development Bank offices globally on Africa Day. Radio Islam International spoke to Alia Kajee, Public Finance Campaigner, at 350Africa.org to find out more.

Kajee says that the activists call on the African Development Bank to move its funding from fossil fuels to more renewable energy sources. The focus is to bring awareness to Africa, as it has been found that the continent will be most affected but has contributed the least toward climate change.

She explained how climate change impacts the environment and brings about socio-economic implications for the continent and used this to mobilise communities on the ground, most affected by the drastic weather changes.

The memorandum is a position paper collectively drafted by civil society and community-based organisations and constitutes three main issues. These include energy, which is significant in decarbonising the energy sector, the second issue deals with agriculture, and the third is climate finance. The paper focuses on energy and agricultural solutions and how the bank can manage to direct finances to the communities that will be most affected.

Kajee says that “just transition is the actual bridge that we need to transition away from a fossil fuel economy, that would be coal, oil, gasses, the basis of our energy systems, and that have led to excessive amounts of greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere and that is exactly what is causing the extreme weather conditions that we see and how we have known that this has increased the potential of the floods that we saw in KZN.”

She says that the just transition must be sustainable and inclusive of the economic systems that support it.

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