The United Nations (UN) Under-Secretary General and Executive Secretary for the Economic Commission for Africa, Carlos Lopes, has urged African countries to prioritise renewable energy and develop leap-frogging capabilities.

Lopez, speaking at the opening session of a high-level panel discussion on the theme Greening Africa’s economies, underscored the importance of structural transformation and warned that failure by Africa to tap into and use renewable energy resources would be a mistake because developed countries paid a great price for their transformation by not doing so.

Fatima Denton, Director of the Special Initiatives Division at ECA moderated the opening session. She said that African countries had embraced industrialisation as a gateway to transformation. However, she said that Africa’s economies need to shift to new pathways such as green economy that would give a significant push to help increase productivity and create jobs.

She cautioned that countries would have to make hard choices and trade-offs to ensure a sustainable transformation. For this to be successful, she identified two preconditions: advances in technology, that would have to exploited; and the need for countries to move away from poor policies and incentivise the system to make the radical shift that would have positive ripple effects in such sectors as energy and agriculture.

Kingsley Amoako, chairperson of the African Centre for Economic Transformation in Ghana and chair of the panel revealed that more than 20 African countries are actively working on different aspects of green economy. He called for a regional platform to ensure effective collaboration and coordination to provide countries with strong and coherent support.