By Chidi Nwafor
The question I keep hearing — from DFI desks in Washington, from ESG leads in Frankfurt, from climate finance roundtables in Nairobi — is some version of the same thing:
“We have the commitments. We have the capital. Why is nothing moving?”
It is the right question. And it is being asked with increasing urgency because the political temperature around climate finance has shifted dramatically. COP30 in Belém confirmed $1.3 trillion in annual climate finance to 2035. The Baku-to-Belém Roadmap is in motion. The AfDB, Afreximbank, and Africa50 have signed frameworks for a $100 billion Africa Green Industrialisation Initiative. The Just Transition Mechanism is now operational.
The pledges have never been larger. The architecture has never been more elaborate.
And yet — as I have written in these pages before — Africa added 4.5 GW of solar in all of 2025, against a target trajectory that requires something closer to 30 GW per year. The gap between what has been committed and what has been built is not narrowing. It is widening.
This is not a capital problem, a policy problem, or an ambition problem. It is an implementation problem. And implementation problems require a different kind of solution.
The Question the Global Framework Cannot Answer
The post-COP30 conversation is dominated by three legitimate concerns.
The first is about credibility. As political headwinds in the United States have driven federal rollback of climate disclosure rules and institutional exits from climate alliances, markets globally are asking whether ESG commitments made in 2021 and 2022 will survive the political cycle. Stakeholders — investors, regulators, civil society — are demanding not just long-term emissions targets, but detailed transition strategies with capital allocation plans, interim milestones, and verifiable metrics.
The second concern is about measurement. From the tightening of Science Based Targets initiative verification processes to the EU’s evolving taxonomy and the proliferation of disclosure standards, the global sustainability reporting landscape has never been more complex or more contested. Businesses are asking how to demonstrate credible progress when the definition of “credible” keeps moving.
The third concern — the one most acutely felt by practitioners in African energy markets — is about translation. How do you take the commitments made in Belém, the frameworks agreed in Glasgow, the capital committed by development finance institutions, and turn them into megawatts on the ground in Nigeria, Ghana, Zambia, and Senegal?
The first two concerns receive most of the attention. The third receives the most of the consequences.
What Implementation Actually Requires: I want to be specific, because specificity is what this conversation almost always lacks.
The projects that close — the ones that actually draw down DFI capital and put solar panels on rooftops — share a set of characteristics that has nothing to do with global frameworks and everything to do with ground-level institutional capability.
They have a clean legal vehicle. Every project that reaches financial close is housed in a Special Purpose Vehicle structured correctly for the jurisdiction, with appropriate governance, ring-fencing, and lender step-in rights. Getting this wrong does not delay a project. It makes it permanently unfinanceable. Most African developers — particularly early-stage and emerging ones — do not have in-house legal and structuring capacity at the level DFIs require.
They have a model that holds up under forensic review. An independent engineer at a DFI will stress-test every assumption: capacity factor, degradation rate, O&M cost escalation, debt service coverage across every year of the tenor. The financial model is not a pitch document. It is a legal artefact. Very few projects in the pipeline I see across West Africa are built to that standard on first pass.
They have a bankable Power Purchase Agreement. Most PPAs executed between Nigerian commercial parties are not bankable by DFI standards. They lack adequate step-in rights for lenders, insufficient termination protections, and no independent dispute resolution mechanism. A PPA that works commercially between two local parties does not automatically work as security for a $20 million debt facility.
They have a credible off-taker strategy. A DFI underwrites your off-taker as rigorously as it underwrites you. If your anchor off-taker is a government agency with a history of payment delays, you need a credit enhancement structure — a letter of credit, an escrow arrangement, a guarantee facility — before you approach a lender. Most developers do not have that structure in place when they enter DFI conversations.
They have a DFI engagement strategy, not a DFI broadcast. The AfDB, IFC, PROPARCO, DEG, British International Investment, and DFC have different mandates, different sector priorities, different processing timelines, and different co-investment preferences. Sending the same Information Memorandum to six institutions simultaneously is not a strategy. The developers who close transactions know which institution fits which transaction — and why.
None of these requirements are unreasonable. All of them are achievable. But achieving them requires a level of institutional infrastructure that most African developers — and many local advisory firms — have not yet built.
The Carbon Layer That Changes the Economics: There is a second implementation gap that is becoming commercially significant.
As I outlined in my previous piece, Africa is sitting on the world’s largest untapped carbon asset — and most developers are not positioned to capture it. The voluntary carbon market is pricing African renewable energy credits at $5 to $15 per tonne. Article 6.2 bilateral agreements are moving prices to $30 to $50 per tonne in some markets. The gap between what developers are capturing and what the market is prepared to pay is enormous.
But the implementation requirements for carbon credit origination are just as demanding as the requirements for DFI financing — and they interact.
A developer who wants to layer carbon revenue onto a solar project needs to address additionality at the design stage, not retrospectively. The additionality case must be credible before project registration, not assembled after the fact. In Nigeria, where the grid emission factor approved by UNFCCC and Verra sits at approximately 0.430 kgCO₂/kWh, a 1 MW solar installation generating 1,500 MWh per year generates roughly 645 tonnes of carbon credits annually. At even the low end of voluntary market pricing, that is a meaningful supplementary cash flow — one that improves the debt service coverage ratio and makes the project more bankable, not just more sustainable.
The developers who understand this are building projects with dual revenue architecture from the outset. The developers who do not are leaving money on the table — and in some cases, structuring projects that would have been financially viable if they had incorporated the carbon layer from day one.
What Needs to Change and Who Needs to Change It
The global climate finance conversation has spent fifteen years on architecture and not enough time on plumbing. The architecture is sound. The Baku-to-Belém Roadmap is a serious document. COP30’s Just Transition Mechanism is a meaningful commitment. The AfDB’s Mission 300 is an ambitious and well-designed programme.
What the architecture cannot do is substitute for the developer who shows up at a DFI’s door with a properly structured SPV, a bankable PPA, a credible off-taker strategy, and a financial model that holds up under independent review. That is a human and institutional capability problem — and it is the constraint that is actually binding.
Three things need to happen, and they need to happen simultaneously.
First, the early-stage capital gap must close. The developers who are building the bankable pipeline that DFIs need do not have balance sheets deep enough to carry pre-development costs through 24 to 36 month processing timelines. Grants, pre-feasibility funding, and technical assistance deployed fast and with light conditions are not charity. They are the mechanism through which bankable pipeline gets created. Without them, the DFIs will keep complaining about the absence of bankable projects while the developers keep complaining about the absence of patient capital. Both will be right.
Second, DFI processing must reflect African project realities. A legal structure that requires three jurisdictions and a tax opinion from London is not appropriate for a 5 MW C&I solar installation in Kano. The institutions that figure out how to process smaller African transactions faster — without compromising governance standards — will deploy more capital than the institutions that are still running European risk templates in African markets.
Third, local developer capacity must be treated as infrastructure. The continent’s energy transition will not be delivered by international developers flying in to close deals. It will be delivered by African developers who understand local markets, have local relationships, and can navigate local regulatory environments — but who need institutional support to meet DFI standards. That support is not widely available. Building it is as important as building the projects themselves.
The Transition Is Not Waiting: Across Africa, COP30’s outcomes are now being translated into implementation plans. The $100 billion Africa Green Industrialisation Initiative. The operationalisation of the African Climate Change Fund. The Just Transition Mechanism that formally recognises the need to support fossil-fuel-dependent economies through economic diversification. These are real commitments with real money behind them.
Nwafor is an energy transition practitioner working across renewable energy development, ESG advisory, and climate finance structuring in Nigeria and Sub-Saharan Africa. He can be reached at chidi.nwafor@de-lazuliconsult.com | Tel: +234 803 676 1032
They will not translate into megawatts unless there are developers ready to receive that capital, structure it correctly, and close transactions that meet institutional standards.
The confidence gap I wrote about in my first piece in this series — the gap between DFIs who do not trust the pipeline and developers who do not trust the capital — is not going to close through better frameworks or more ambitious pledges. It closes deal by deal, transaction by transaction, through the patient and unglamorous work of building the institutional infrastructure that makes African energy projects bankable.
That is the work. That is what implementation looks like.
Every month a project stalls in due diligence, a factory somewhere runs a diesel generator that did not need to run. Every carbon credit that goes unregistered is revenue that never reached a developer who needed it to keep the next project alive. Every DFI ticket that dies in a credit committee because the PPA lacked a step-in right is a megawatt that never gets built.
The gap between pledge and project is not an abstraction. It is a number measured in megawatts and in dollars, and right now that number is far too large.
The implementation revolution that Africa’s energy transition needs does not start in Belém or Brussels or Washington. It starts on the ground, in the transactions, with the developers who are ready to do the work.
Nwafor is an energy transition practitioner working across renewable energy development, ESG advisory, and climate finance structuring in Nigeria and Sub-Saharan Africa. He can be reached at chidi.nwafor@de-lazuliconsult.com | Tel: +234 803 676 1032
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Every month a project stalls in due diligence, a factory somewhere runs a diesel generator that didn’t need to run.
That line is from this piece and it’s what I think about every time a transaction I’m working on hits a structural wall that has nothing to do with the project’s fundamentals.
This third article in the Africa energy transition series is live today in Peoples Daily. It’s about the gap between the pledges made in Belém and the megawatts that actually get built and what it would take to close it.