Cattle graze near wind turbines in Sarita, Texas. (Photographer: Eddie Seal/Bloomberg)

Hundreds of thousands of people in sub-Saharan Africa will get access to electricity for the first time thanks to an extra £100 million of funding from the United Kingdom government.

JOHANNESBURG –  Hundreds of thousands of people in sub-Saharan Africa will get access to electricity for the first time thanks to an extra £100 million of funding from the United Kingdom government .

The new investment — announced at the COP24 global climate summit in Poland — triples funds for the Renewable Energy Performance Platform (REPP), to support up to 40 more renewable energy projects over the next five years. it could unlock an extra £156 million of private finance into renewable energy markets in Africa by 2023.

Developers of small-scale solar, wind, hydro and geothermal projects will be supported to harness each country’s natural resources, providing 2.4 million people a year with new or improved access to clean energy.

Power produced from new projects funded is expected to save around three million tonnes of carbon over their lifetime, compared with fossil fuel generation – the equivalent to the emissions from burning 21,000 railway cars of coal or from 800,000 cars in a year.

“At home we’re world leaders in cutting emissions while growing our economy and abroad we’re showing our international leadership by giving countries a helping hand to shift to greener, cleaner economies,” UK Energy and Clean Growth Minister Claire Perry said.

“This £100 million will help communities harness the power of their natural resources to provide hundreds of thousands of people with electricity for the first time. Building these clean, reliable sources of energy will also create thousands of quality jobs in these growing green economies.”

The new investment is in addition to £48 million previously committed to the REPP, which is is already supporting 18 renewable energy projects in a range of countries from Tanzania to Burundi.

These projects, featuring solar, wind, biomass, hydro and geothermal technologies, are expected to provide new or improved access for more than 4.5 million people over the project lifetimes, creating 8,000 jobs during development and operation.

Source

• IOL, ANA Reporter, 18 Dec 2018
• African News Agency (ANA)...

The Residue Recovery System™ is a single pass harvesting system, developed by farmers for farmers to unlock a viable renewables business (Image: Farmax/DalinYebo).

Source:

• Thompson Reuters, 10 March 2017
• By Tanisha Heiberg, Editing by James Macharia/Ruth Pitchford

References:

• GreenEnergyPark.co.za
• DalinYebo.com
• Biomass.Market

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Biobased Economy In South Africa is at its Infancy (Image: Carl Smorenburg).

When USDA released the first-ever Economic Impact Analysis of the U.S. Biobased Products Industry last year, we were thrilled to see what a positive impact this sector was having on our economy, and this updated analysis shows that the sector is not just holding strong, but growing.

– Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said at reports release this week in Washington, D.C.

A new report released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has revealed the precise amount that the bio-based products industry contributed to the US economy and how many jobs it sustains.

Just how much are biobased products worth (to the US economy)?

http://www.biobasedworldnews.com reports:

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(Image Credit:  Xochiquetzal Fonseca/CIMMYT)

A new project that aims to provide farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa with stress-tolerant maize varieties has been launched to help the region boost food security. The Stress Tolerant Maize for Africa (STMA) project will apply conventional breeding techniques to develop maize varieties and hybrids capable of resisting environmental shocks, including drought, low soil fertility, heat, pests and diseases.

• The project aims to increase maize productivity by 30-50 per cent
• It will benefit 5.5 million smallholders in 12 African nations
• An expert calls for more improved maize varieties to help more nations

Editor’s Note: Although the maize plants always makes a cob, even during drought, the good news is that STMA will create stable biomass supply chains (see Cob.Trade or Biomass.Market), as “Collecting Cobs Makes Good Business Sense.”

Twelve Sub-Sahara Africa countries — Benin, Ghana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Uganda, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe — will benefit from the project, which also seeks to enhance sustainable maize research and development systems in the focus countries.

“The project also seeks to increase commercialisation of improved multiple stress-tolerant maize varieties with gender-preferred traits.”

Tsedeke Abate, CIMMYT

The STMA project to be run by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), is being funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development. The four-year project (2016-2019) launched last month (March 21) is expected to increase maize productivity by 30-50 per cent and provide 5.5 million smallholder farmers with improved maize varieties.

The project follows the success of a drought-tolerant maize project that was implemented in Sub-Saharan Africa by CIMMYT and the IITA from 2007 to 2015. It helped improve food and income security of smallholder farmers by developing and disseminating more than 250 drought-tolerant, well-adapted maize varieties, says CIMMYT.  According to CIMMYT, more than 35 million hectares of cultivated maize in Sub-Saharan Africa rely on the rain, thus making environmental shocks such as drought have major impact on smallholders whose livelihoods depend on the crop.

Tsedeke Abate, the STMA project leader at CIMMYT, says the project seeks to provide innovative breeding tools and techniques applied for increasing the rate of genetic gain in the maize breeding pipeline. “The project also seeks to increase commercialisation of improved multiple stress-tolerant maize varieties with gender-preferred traits by the Sub-Saharan African seed sector and increase seed availability and farmer uptake of stress-tolerant maize varieties,” Abate tells SciDev.Net. According to Abate, the project will work with private and public seed companies and national agricultural research systems to facilitate uptake of the new technologies.

Rinn Self, a programme officer at the US-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, says maize production is increasingly threatened by climate change and worsening environmental conditions, including droughts, floods and poor soil. “The improved seeds in the hands of both smallholder farmers, many of whom are women, as well as small and medium enterprises, which produce, market and sell seeds and other inputs, play a critical part in the agricultural value chain,” Self notes.

Aboubacar Toure, programme officer, crop improvement and variety adoption at Kenya-headquartered Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), calls for incentives to help plant breeders develop new technologies and produce seed varieties that can adapt to climate change. Toure also urges African governments to scale up the improved technology so that many farmers can be reached with high-yielding cereal varieties.

Source: www.scidev.net

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• Drought-tolerant maize ‘could be available by 2017’