President Kagame today arrived in Lusaka, Zambia to attend the formal opening of the Annual Meetings of the African Development Bank themed “Energy and climate Change”.
Held over five days, the summit brought together over 2,500 participants including Heads of state and stakeholders to discuss how to tackle severe energy deficit in the continent where 650 million people don’t have access to electricity.
The meetings was preceded by the launch of the African Economic Outlook, an in-depth discussion of the state of the continent’s economies in 2016.
President Kagame also joined President Uhuru Kenyatta and AfDB President Dr. Adesina Akinwumi on a CNBC televised panel “Path to universal access to energy in Africa” on the sidelines of the 51st Annual Meetings.
“The approach to energy for us has been the right mix of off and on grid power for industries. The energy mix will be dictated by our needs and resources. We are tired of poverty and a bad environment and one way to deal with these two issues is to invest in industrialization. As leaders, we are committed to finding ways of accelerating the progress already being made. There is new momentum, we are beginning to move with a sense of urgency as a continent. Let’s continue to fix our problems and also allow our citizens to have electricity.” President Kagame told participants.
“We need to deal with the issue of outages. Let’s not deviate – we need to improve our central infrastructure, transmission. We need to stop theorising but put in place practical and tangible solutions.” President Kenyatta added.
Heads of State and Government at the summit included Presidents Edgar Lungu of Zambia, Idriss Deby of Chad and Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya. Nigeria Vice-President of Nigeria Yemi Osinbajo, Prime Ministers of Tanzania and Mozambique – Kassim Majaliwa and Carlos Agostinho do Rosário respectively.
Other high-profile attendees include Akon, Kofi Annan, Aliko Dangote, Ashish Thakkar, John Kufuor, Mary Robinson, Mo Ibrahim, Nancy Lee, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Tony Elumelu, among others.
The last AfDB Annual Meeting was held in Ivory Coast.
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