 Our turnout was a bit higher than expected, so our apologies to the folks in the way back who may not have a seat, but we hope you'll hang with us. My name's Jennifer Cook, and I direct the Africa program here at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. I want to welcome you all to CSIS, and it's really wonderful to see the level of interest in today's event, which is on the big outcomes of President Obama's recent trip to Africa, and in particular on the Power Africa initiative that he announced. Today's event is part of the Chevron Forum on Development. This is a series of speaker events and part of a larger initiative here at CSIS under the leadership of our U.S. Leadership and Development program, which is co-directed by Johanna Nessith, who is probably here, and Dan Rundie, that looks at the role of the private sector in development, how U.S. development assistance can harness the energy of the private sector and maximize development impacts. So we're very grateful to the Chevron Corporation for their important support. I'd also really like to thank Christina Perkins of CSIS, who's done a great job and worked very hard to bring this big event together today. As most of you know, President Obama traveled to Africa from June 25th to June 3rd, visiting Senegal, Tanzania, and South Africa. This was his first trip to the region since a brief visit to Ghana in 2009, and the trip, the initiatives that he announced, and I think the very warm reception that he received in Africa, presents a real opportunity to re-energize U.S. partnerships on the continent and to engage African governments, entrepreneurs, and citizens, I think, in a new and different way. The President spoke of this paradigm shift in U.S. relations with Africa that moves the U.S. away from thinking of the continent as a place of disease and conflict and need, to one with much greater emphasis on economic growth, investment in trade, and sustained development. I think this entails a major shift that is beginning not entirely there in a mindset I think both in the U.S. and in Africa, where perceptions of pursuit of commercial interests and profit, there's always been something seen as slightly unseemly about that when you talk about Africa. But I think now we're moving to the idea that, in fact, these commercial ties, if managed well, can help drive growth, employment, development, and enduring ties of mutual interest. And this is welcome, I think, here in the U.S., but particularly among an up-and-coming generation of Africans. On June 30th in Tanzania, the President announced the Power Africa Initiative. And this is a signature element of this new paradigm shift that aims to tackle one of the major drags on the well-being of African populations and communities, particularly in rural areas. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to Africa's continued economic growth and a huge barrier for potential investors looking to engage in Africa, and that's access to reliable and affordable electricity. The President's focus on energy is extremely important, and the hope is that this initiative gains in momentum and gets the holding power needed to be truly transformative. So I think the turnout today attests to the enthusiasm and excitement that the initiative has generated. There's leadership and bipartisan support in Congress to tackle this issue with Chairman Royce, Congressman Engel, Congressman Smith, Congresswoman Bass introducing legislation, the Electrify Africa Act of 2013, and there's huge receptivity in Africa as well. So this is really an important opportunity, and it's important that we make the most of this. We're very happy to have with us today Andrew Herskowitz, who is newly appointed as coordinator for both the Power Africa Initiative and the Trade Africa Initiative. Andrew most recently served as AID's mission director in Ecuador, deputy director in Peru, and previously with the Office of Development Credit, which leverages private sector funds through its development credit authority program. Andrew has a major task ahead of him. He's going to be based in Nairobi. He's going to have to coordinate the many agencies involved in this initiative. And we want to see him succeed and the initiatives succeed. We're going to hear from Andrew on the broad parameters of the initiative. What's new? What should we be looking for to gauge progress? What are the big challenges as he sees them? We're then going to take a few questions, and at two, he has an important commitment. We'll turn to our panel with Ambassador Perry from the Corporate Council on Africa, Chris Campanova from Symbian Power, Ben Leo from the One Campaign, and Sarah Ladislaw. So Andrew, welcome, and thanks again for joining us. This is quite a crowd for 1.30 on a Friday afternoon in the summer in Washington, D.C. So I'm guessing that there's a strong appetite for information about Power Africa, and you guys have the right person here to finally be able to speak to you about something like this. I've been dying to speak about Power Africa for several months now, and it's now been announced, and I'm at your disposal to answer all the questions that you're going to have. So I'm going to be somewhat brief, but what I'll probably do, let me just give you a general overview of Power Africa and how we got to where we are today. For me, this is probably the most exciting thing that I've seen in development in a long time in the United States, and the reason is we're taking this approach that we're taking of this whole-of-government approach and putting this initiative in the field, and having it driven by the private sector, by our host government counterparts, and multiple U.S. government agencies. Multiple agencies presents a huge challenge, but it's a level of communication that we're having and coordination amongst one another, which is already making this a success. When I first joined USAID about 15 years ago, I'm a lawyer by training. I was in the general counsel's office, and I was the lawyer for the Office of Development Credit, which provides loan guarantees for USAID. I felt during my first few months that I was spending half my time over at OMB arguing with OPIC as to what our mandate was and saying that it was basically turf battles nonstop, and I found it extremely frustrating. But then what I saw was those turf battles were actually forcing us to better define our missions, forcing people to defend their budgets, forcing people to be more innovative, forcing people to be more creative, and it was producing great results. So I think I've learned a lot from that, and I think having this structure that we have is absolutely outstanding. It's going to lead to great results. My only hope is that one year from now, if CSIS has another event like this, that we have the same kind of crowd that we have right now who remains interested in Power Africa. So Power Africa, it emerged from a trip, a high level trip that was taken with folks from the White House, USAID, and other agencies a little over a year ago to Africa, and they were looking at what are the key constraints to growth in Africa in these particular countries. And what they saw all around them, and this was confirmed by several members, staff members who I met with on the Hill also, who had a similar trip, was that they were looking at these companies who were working in countries that were enjoying a high rate of growth, but they weren't able to keep up with their power production. They were burning expensive diesel generators that were polluting in expensive diesel generators. So they need to come up with a solution for this. And that's really what Power Africa is really about, is how we can help keep these countries on a sustainable path to rapid development, at the same time increasing connectivity and increasing access for people, and also trying to promote clean energy solutions. Because in Africa, we're not inheriting the old grid that we have in the United States and other countries. We have opportunities that aren't presented to us in the United States. It's very similar to the cell phone analogy where most of the countries in the developing world have kind of jumped over landlines and we're now going to try to do the same thing for power. The approach that we're taking is a transactional approach. Traditionally, the development approach was spending years, maybe sometimes a decade or more, trying to create the proper regulatory environment so that the private sector would then come in and make its investments. We're kind of flipping that model. And what we're doing is we're looking at transactions that are already in the pipeline or that might come onto the pipeline large energy transactions that have the potential to really be transformational, figuring out what the US government can do from its existing toolbox or perhaps developing new tools, whether that's technical assistance from USAID or loan guarantees from OPIC and EXIM, technical assistance from the Department of Energy, perhaps a policy push from the State Department through the ambassador. What can we do to remove those obstacles to these transactions or use our tools to expedite these transactions? Basically what we're doing is we're putting a large carrot on the table for these host governments and we're saying to them, if you want to increase the amount of electricity by one gigawatt, two gigawatts, 400 megawatts, you need to make the following reforms. But we're here to help you. We're not going to necessarily pay for them, but we will help you get the private sector investors. We'll help the private sector have the confidence necessary to invest in your country, but you need to make the commitments. Now what does that look like? I'll take a country, we can take a country where there's maybe a large geothermal transaction. It may be that the host government has never negotiated a power purchasing agreement before. So USAID can come in and we can help find lawyers or actually I can tell you a little bit more about how we would do that, but basically provide the government the legal assistance or access to the legal assistance that it needs to negotiate that agreement. At the same time, it may be that the developer or financier needs a guarantee, so OPIC could do that, or perhaps the seller of the equipment wants a guarantee and ExSim would provide that assistance. It may be that the SOI needs a feasibility study for this project, so US Trade Development Agency can fund that feasibility study. So it's taking all of our tools and sitting around one table and figuring out how can we push forward. The participating agencies to date are USAID, OPIC, ExSim, Department of Treasury, USTDA, Department of Commerce, Department of Energy, USDA, Department of Transportation, Millennium Challenge Corporation, US African Development Foundation, and Department of State. And if there's anyone I left off, please let me know, but it's a big number. The countries that we're focusing in right now, and this is a list that could change over time, are Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, and Ethiopia. Now, the amount of buzz that Power Africa has generated, I'm sorry, repeat the countries. Ghana, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Nigeria. Liberia, there's six of them, okay. Liberia and Kenya, these things, okay. I was proud of myself for remembering all like this and getting all the agencies right. So really, but what we've seen already is that we're seeing multiple, not just other embassies and other USAID missions who want to be part of Power Africa, but there's countries that want to be part of Power Africa. But the question is, what does it mean to be part of Power Africa? Power Africa really is, it's kind of, it's meant to compliment a lot of the activities that are already doing great things from the US government and from other agencies. You've got the Department of State, which is managing the UN's SE for All initiative in Ghana. The Millennium Challenge Corporation has compacts with both Tanzania and Ghana in the energy sector. You've got the Partnership for Growth also in Ghana and Tanzania. You've got USAID's Africa Infrastructure Program. You've got OPIC and TDA, which recently launched their Clean Energy Facility in Johannesburg and they've got people in the field there. You've got the EGCI Initiative out of the State Department. We have all these different US government initiatives and programs and activities. And what Power Africa does, one, it brands perhaps the US government's power activities, but it's using existing tools and making sure that these existing tools are talking to one another, are complimenting one another, and that we're basically trying to improve the impact, increase the impact they're having. But most importantly, what Power Africa is doing is we now have some, we have additional financing to provide the tools for things like partnership for growth. So along those lines, one of the things that we're doing to ensure this collaboration is in Washington, we've got an interagency transactions group and weekly it gets together and we look at different transactions that are already in the pipeline and it's really information sharing. This for me is the best part of what's going on right now. We had a meeting yesterday, someone from an agency mentioned a company that approached them. People from other agencies said, oh, maybe we can actually do a feasibility study for them if they move forward on this. Another agency can raise an issue, oh, there might be an issue with them on this. Another person raised a technical point and this is a type of collaboration. It was almost like a development cabinet that we're having meet on a weekly basis and it's limited to this sector, but Power Africa is really setting up the model for how the US government development really can be working in the future. Why don't I leave it at that for right now for the general overview and to take some questions because my time is limited to 10 minutes and the reason is I'm picking up my 10 year old son from summer camp after he's been gone for a month. We hope so, we hope so. So this is the question that comes up. Is this, are we competing with China? Are we gonna be working with China? We're gonna definitely be engaging with China on this because our ultimate goal is to increase the amount of power available on the African continent and President Obama mentioned this. Well, I think a group of questions and then I can try to address them. What does it take? Okay, let me start, okay. Another question. Please wait for the mic for being webcast. As of a month ago, OPEC was talking about a carbon cap. Is something gonna be done about that? Okay. Yes, I'm Dr. Nisar Chaudhary. I just wanted to know what were the criterion of selecting these six countries out of so many countries and there are so many challenges and problems all across Africa. Thank you. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Rosemary Segero. I'm the President of Hope for Tomorrow. Thank you so much for the power Africa. My question is, as a clope or test, I come from Kenya. How is the power Africa going to involve the African diaspora and the African civil society because we attended the clope or diaspora, the State Department and USID. We need you to involve the civil society to know what you are doing, where we are, who are being helped and others, it will help you make it better than just relying on government and those big organizations and companies. Thank you. So let me just answer this first round of questions quickly. Your point is a great one and that's why I'm moving to Nairobi in three weeks. Our office is going to be based out of Kenya. This is the first presidential initiative that will be based outside of the United States, although I'm counting on one of the people over here to tell me that 150 years ago something like this happened elsewhere. So we're going to be based out of the African continent. To date, we already have over $14 billion. The President announced $9 billion. Some of it's a little bit of double counting because you've got banks who are providing financing to some of the developers, but just in just over about 30 days, we got over $14 billion in private sector commitments. And I would say that the majority would, is that fair of a necessity? The majority of the private sector commitments come from African or probably, it's a good share of it. So a good share of it. We have several billion dollars in commitments from African companies, African banks, African organizations. When I mentioned this idea of providing like legal services, for instance, the host governments, what we're looking at doing is trying to fund the African legal support facility, which is affiliated with the AFDB, so that they would be charged with, not just providing legal services to host governments, but also doing capacity building and training for government lawyers so that they, this will be a sustainable endeavor. On the issue of what does it take to be a Power Africa country, this has evolved. A lot of it was determined based on the current transaction, the deal flow. That's why I said this six countries, this is somewhat fluid, but what we're really looking for is that there's a strong host government commitment to make the tough reforms. And that may be cost-reflective tariffs, which is very politically unpopular, or it could be breaking up a utility, but we wanna make sure that there's a strong host government commitment to make the tough reforms. Because otherwise, even if we invested billions of dollars in a particular country, it's not gonna make any difference in the long run, unless they make those reforms. And that's why I wanna be very clear that this initiative is about leveraging, it's about coordination, it's about making difficult reforms so that we create a better enabling environment for the private sector to come in. If we can have success with one or two large transactions in a country, and to get that success, it required the government to make those tough reforms, then more private sector competition will come into those countries. On the issue of the carbon cap, that's not really, I'm not the person to address that. That would be more an issue, the opaque in Congress, so we're obviously aware of that issue though. Another round of questions? Gentlemen, back there. Thank you. Lawrence Freeman from the African Deske AR. There's been various publicity figures that have come out since the trip, doubling the amount of energy in Africa, increasing it by 20 million people have access. Could you give me the bottom line figures? What I've read in the fact sheet is 8,000 megawatts. Could you say what is the current access in Africa? How much this will add? Will it really double? I mean, it seems much smaller scale than being advertised, but I would appreciate the baseline figures. Okay, other questions? Gentlemen. Timothy Towell, former head of Africa at the Peace Corps. This is a town where Republicans and Democrats fight each other morning, noon, and night, including in this room. This seems to be packaged for both Republicans and Democrats. Am I correct? You've got all this dealing with the government in an initiative by President Obama who occasionally gets criticized in this town, but you are opening the door and paving the way and leveraging your word for the private sector. That's something that my Republican friends talk about morning, noon, and night and in their sleep. So I'm gonna actually, before I take another round of questions, you've hit the nail on the head. We have bipartisan support so far from what we've seen. The press on this has been almost 99% positive on this. I've seen very little criticism of it because we're doing things the right way. As I tell people, USAID's mission isn't to create jobs necessarily for Americans, but the Department of Commerce is heavily involved in this. And if GE is able to sell a turbine in one of the countries and that's creating jobs for Americans, that's what we want to do. This is about creating jobs. It's about creating access. It's about creating new opportunities. That's what I'm emphasizing. This is an economic growth initiative. This is about creating opportunities for U.S. companies and African companies which creates jobs for people and improves their lives. And all the other benefits of increased access and refrigeration for medications and light bulbs for students to study by, that's all gonna come out of this. On the issue of the 10,000 megawatts and 20 million. So that was based on, and that's, we're confident that we will hit those numbers. Now by what year? I think it was probably by 2020. We were confident that we'll hit those numbers. And that's just based on the deal flow that we're supporting right now. We've had our technical experts and our engineers kind of look at number of megawatts that would come online. But we expect additional transactions to come online. The doubling the number of people in sub-Saharan Africa, that's aspirational. And if we continue this, if this goes beyond the five years, I have absolute confidence that we will be able to do that over time. All the hands went up now when I said that. How are we gonna do it? Gentlemen right here. I apologize to people in the back. I'm just going to, my fingers can only point so far right now. No problem, it's tough. My name is Steve Meyer. I've developed power projects in Africa. Andrew, thank you for your remarks. First of all, and for this initiative. Most of the financing organizations you've talked about are concerned with debt and taking risk on the debt. But I haven't seen any of them that take risk on the equity. Typically that comes from the counterpart to the PPA, which often isn't able to provide the kind of security equity looks for. Is any part of your initiative geared towards protecting equity? Other questions? I'll go toward the back. Someone way in the back who's got their hand up. Just stand up and... Walker Williams. Andrew, I'm concerned a little bit. We have to go to Nairobi to get involved or will you have a website or can we go to DOE? So we have a lot... Well, okay. So we will continue to have an office. So this interagency transactions group that I'm talking about, USAID is leading the secretariat for the initiative and we have a strong Washington presence. So in fact, what we're looking at doing, and this is more background, is having two one-stop shops. A one-stop shop on the African continent where we have people and ideally, this is a little bit blue sky right now, but we're looking at trying to develop this, is to have a place where there are people who are familiar with the transactions of all the different agencies. People can come to the office and learn about that to accommodate businesses there. And the same type of thing here in Washington to create opportunities. So we've been talking to the Department of Commerce for instance about having an outreach that really focuses on off-grid, mini-grid and other types of opportunities for U.S. companies. Sorry, I went over here. Thank you very much. How is Power Africa leveraging its resources to protect African workers so they have decent work conditions, decent wages and safety on the job? Okay, I'm gonna address the development financing question. I mean, so the equity question. So at this point, we're not looking at taking equity in the projects themselves, but I'm not gonna rule that out in the future if it's something that the right opportunities present themselves, especially for some of the smaller, smaller, you know, the off-grid and the micro-grid activities. But what we are learning is that one of the biggest risks for some of these deals is sort of the upfront development financing. So we're trying to listen to the private sector and finding out what are the constraints. And that's when I mentioned earlier that we're using the existing tools in our toolbox and perhaps developing new tools. I can't tell you what tools we may have a year from now, two years from now. And we would have to consult with Congress and find out what tools they would, you know, if we can make the case and their support for it to see if Congress agrees with this and gives us the authorities to do that. Terms of protecting African workers. Well, look, we're doing fairly extensive due diligence on every partner that we work with or developing due diligence protocols. This comes up like, how do you select which companies you work with? How do you select which deals? We're continuing, these are still in development at the inter-agency level. We're still sort of sorting out who makes the decisions. Right now, each agency is continuing to follow its existing protocols that it has, whether it's related to how workers are treated or environmental implications. And it's still an ongoing discussion that we're having. In the back over there, let's see. This, I think probably my last round of questions, I'll take one more round of questions. Make it a good one, a hard one. My name is Bohendwa, I'm a national of the Congo. I'd like to know why has the Congo's enormous potential in lighting Africa has been neglected because the Congo has massive potential of lighting the entire continent. Why take six countries that can barely provide electricity to the entire continent and neglect that huge potential from the Congo that has the capability of lighting the entire Africa? Why not invest in such a country? Thank you. On the side of the room, in the back. Amy Hassenberg Manchester Trade, I'm wondering how you think that power Africa will affect the renewal of a Goa in 2015? Okay, other questions? Right here. Hi, Carly Hafner from Mercy Corps. How is resilience being incorporated into the Power Africa Initiative? Other question? Gentleman right here. All these familiar faces asking questions, okay. Mike's coming. Right here in Africa. As others, I'm surprised that there are no Francophone countries are included. I'm sure you're going to reconsider the list. My question is about a toolbox. Is it necessary? If I understand it correct, there's a large amount of export subsidies. Is this really a necessary instrument? There might be a trade distortionary. It's like a Chinese selling solar panels. It's not exactly a change in paradigm if you continue export subsidies. There are other ways to support the initiative, thank you. From the right here. Yeah, go ahead. My name is Ronke Luke. I'm originally from Sierra Leone. So I find it kind of interesting and amusing that all of a sudden all these, is all this private African money that sort of come out of the woodworks to support this effort. Because when we try to raise money in Africa, they give us ridiculous interest rates, 20% at the bank for projects. And there's a project that we were involved with like last year, a couple of years ago. In the end, young folks, young entrepreneurs, we raised the money through crowdsourcing. There was no private venture money or any of those kinds of things. So maybe when you talk to these private African financiers, they might want to put up some money to young people or entrepreneurs on the continent. As opposed to maybe this is a bit of a PR thing they can get associated with a big high profile US venture. Okay, I'll try to address a few of these. So the issue of the conger, I assume you're talking about the Inga Dam, right? So if people know the Inga Dam has the potential for I think about 40 gigawatts of power and it's viewed, Grand Inga potentially could provide power to 500 million Africans. And it's just something that we're not rolling anything out at this point. I'm not saying that we're gonna go and start building Grand Inga. Same thing with other countries, the Francophone countries, there was no intent to exclude Francophone countries. In fact, I was responding to emails today and I was sending things out to people from Senegal, from Rwanda, from multiple other countries, including Malawi, to asking our own staff to start responding to some basic questions because we as a group, as an interagency, have to figure out what are the exact criteria that we're gonna do. But as I mentioned, it's gonna be important that there's a post-government commitment to make the difficult reforms. Governance is key to success. But we also have limited resources. We need to demonstrate success. If we spread ourselves too thin, we're not gonna have any success. And even among six countries, it's limited resources that we have. Seven billion dollars sounds like a lot of money, a lot of that's financing. But even seven billion dollars if it was real hard, appropriated dollars is just a drop in the bucket for the amount of money that it requires to really have a huge impact on the entire African continent. On the question of, well, why aren't the Africans investing in Africa already? Why do they need this? I can speak to that just based on my past experience when I was working for the Development Credit Authority Office at USAID. There's tons of liquidity all over the world in developing countries. But the same reasons that you're mentioning are the reasons that often these deals aren't happening. High interest rates, they're not getting the terms that they need to make this deal marketable. There might be a lack of familiarity with the sector. If you're dealing with a person on the other side who's never negotiated a power purchasing agreement or has never managed something before, you're not going to invest your money. And that's what the idea behind Power Africa is, is our tools are not meant to be government subsidies. They're meant to help the market, adjust to the market conditions so that we can create an effect, an impact, so that we don't need to provide this assistance in the future. Once that government official's negotiated a power purchasing agreement, they won't need that million dollars from a US law firm or an international law firm to come in and train them on how to do that. The idea is that as other people see what the private sector is doing and as they are engaging these transactions, they won't need this. They won't need this type of assistance and we can focus in other areas. We can focus in other countries. One last question, I hope it's a good one so that I gotta go get my son, sorry. I'm Bob Hershey, I'm a consultant. To what extent are you using the internet to coordinate among the donors and the agencies and people doing the project? Well, we're doing better than the internet. We're picking up the phone and we're calling them. We're talking with them and we're meeting with them. So I was over at the World Bank today. We talked to the African Development Bank, is really our lead partner on this and they're investing heavily in it and anything that we can do to be working with them, that's how we're managing this. Thank you everyone and again, please promise me if I'm back here a year from now, you all will show up again and still be interested in this initiative. Andrew, thanks so much. Andrew, really terrific and chock-a-blockful of information. Why don't we bring our panel up here and we'll get started. Well, once again, thank you to our panel for waiting. I think that gave us a lot of great information, kind of the approach, this transactional approach rather than trying to build the perfect regulatory structure and waiting for people to come. I wonder if there are some drawbacks to that as we talk through this. We're gonna turn to our panel today, which is a mix of private sector advocacy and independent analysis. Here from them, how important is this initiative in terms of what they do? What might be some of the missing elements where we can build out? What is it that we need to be looking for in terms of success and how is this gonna help what they're trying to do? We have, to my left, I'm not gonna go through extensive biographies because you have them. We have Ambassador Robert Perry, who's vice president for programs at the Corporate Council on Africa. Corporate Council hosted a major discussion in Tanzania that the president, hosted the president at this discussion with business leaders. Obviously, Ambassador Perry has a good perspective, kind of from the broader private sector community beyond some of those who are already engaged. Their mission is trying to reach out to pull new players into that. We also have Chris Campanovo, who is director for business development, I believe, at Symbian Power. Symbian has had a strong presence in Tanzania. The announcement of Power Africa was made at a Symbian plant. Interesting partnerships that they've had already with the US government in various ways. I think Chris will say a little bit about what this initiative means, how those partnerships have been working, where maybe some of the opportunities for expansion on this initiative are. We then have Ben Leo, who is director of Global Policy at the One Campaign. And One has been playing a very important role in raising this issue of energy access and the tremendous development burden that it places on Africa. Ben has also been working with the US Congress, I believe, on the Electrify Africa Act. And so I think can say a little bit too about how this initiative and the Electrify Africa Act mesh together and what might be missing and what are the critical next steps for the Congress, for the administration, I think for all of us here to make that happen. Finally, we have Sarah Ladislaw, who's a co-director of the CSIS energy program. Sarah has done a lot of great work on climate change. And I think the timing of this initiative coming right after President Obama's speech on climate change offers up some of the dilemmas. Someone mentioned the carbon cap over here. What are some of the dynamics within that, the trade-offs, the constraints in terms of climate change and the Power Africa initiative. Each of our speakers will talk probably 10 minutes or so, max, even shorter. And we wanna leave ample time for comments and conversation with the audience. So Ambassador Perry, I'm gonna turn to you first. Thanks again for joining us today. Thank you very much, Jennifer. It's a pleasure to be here and join you this afternoon to launch this important event, Power Initiative in Africa. Its importance, I consider it transformative. We all know about projected population growth in Africa. So in terms of production, that's one key element that African countries certainly will have in their advantage moving forward over the next two to three decades. What has been missing in terms of competitiveness is adequately priced and available electric power. This initiative is a step in changing that. I think there are projections that China's population will level off over the next three decades while Africa's increases. So what I see in the future is Africa with both the population and electric power to be a competitive producer for the global supplies. This initiative brings together both private sector interest in the market and U.S. government support in terms of risk mitigation for that investment. Make no mistake, investment in Africa is risky. Companies are in business to make money and they do it by assessing risk and offsetting risk. And the role of the USG here is to help them manage that process. I think there have been a number of agencies working in this area sort of individually over the past decade, certainly USAID and MCC, each in their respective areas. USTDA has helped with feasibility studies. But this coordination that we have now I think will be a game changer. Reaching out, focus on the policy commitment of African governments is essential. If you ask yourself, why didn't this happen 10 years ago? I think that's the answer. The policy commitment was not there. If it does not come in the next two to three years, country to country, companies will not put their money in, certainly not a second time. They might make a first investment, but if they lose on that, they won't follow up with more. To get where we want to be in 20 years, we are looking for companies to go in with initial deals. They work for everyone's benefit and then they go a second time, a third time, and three or four more join them just like has happened in China over the last 30 years in terms of US corporate engagement. I think the same thing can happen in Africa because essentially you have a much freer market in many of the countries. And I think that dynamic will change and expand over the coming years also. The thing about this initiative is that it has the capacity and I think you see that from some of the players of incorporating multiple sources of fuel. Many countries now depend on very expensive diesel fuel that will transition. Company countries discovering natural gas will draw upon that I would expect, but there's also other sources of renewable power. I just wanna share with you some information from the International Energy Agency. It surprised me when I read it, but so that's why I wanna share it. As global renewable electricity generation expands in absolute terms, it is expected to surpass that from natural gas and double that from nuclear power by 2016, becoming the second most important global electricity source after coal. Globally, renewable generation is estimated to rise to 25% of gross power generation in 2018, up from 20% in 2011 and 19% in 2006. Driven by fast growing generation from wind and solar voltaics, the share of non-hydro renewable power is seen doubling to 8% of gross generation in 2018, up from 4% in 2011 and just 2% in 2006. There's tremendous potential there, and I mentioned that on the renewable side because most of the deals I think we see in this early stage are focused on thermal power, but it's not limited to that. I think certainly when you're dealing with large population centers, cities of a million and more, probably thermal power solutions are the most economical, but you have populations spread around in smaller towns and villages where off-grid solutions powered by renewables probably are the most rational answer to provide that access to power to people, that thousand people living in that village that they have power, that they can work as long as they want and are not limited to either the information or actual work in terms of the sun. And so this has a possibility of opening up a lot. And I expect that many American companies will jump in many, like my colleague here from Simeon Power, they are already there. They started in Tanzania with an MCC compact for transmission lines, and from that they invested in a power generation plan. You will see much more than that. On Monday I had a call from two Nigerian companies because there's a tender up in Nigeria for privatization of 10 plants in the Niger Delta. They were looking for American partners. I reached out to some CCA members to put them in contact, and some of them will follow up on that. So I expect an explosion of interest, and I'm glad to see that the USG is stepping in to help companies mitigate that risk. Thank you. Thank you so much, Bob, and we'll come back to you in Q&A. Chris, let's hear from the Simeon who is at the heart of this thing. Sure. Thank you, Jennifer, and thanks to CSIS. Mine too, closer. For hosting this event, obviously it's timely. We're extremely happy to not just be here, but to have been a central part of it, very at least the president rolling out this initiative. Just to give you a little background on our company, I think it's helpful just to put it in context. We started out as an engineering procurement and construction firm in Iraq in 2005 where we were implementing Army Corps of Engineer contracts, transmission lines, and went from there to Afghanistan where we worked on 100 megawatt diesel-fired power plant in Kabul, and then when MCC put out the tender for the work in Tanzania, we sort of jumped around and said, wow, this is great, let's go somewhere where we're not getting shot at. And as it happened, some of the key management in our company had been working together in Tanzania since the early 80s. Sorry. So it was a perfect opportunity. We had relationships that went back 20, 30 years. We knew the country, we knew the context, and thankfully we were successful and secured two major contracts with MCC, one for the construction of about 1,000 kilometers overhead distribution lines, 33KV-11 and LV, and then another for the construction of 26 substations, mostly Greenfield, all across Tanzania and as well as in Zanzibar. We took advantage of that opportunity to purchase the Obungu power plant, which is where President Obama spoke last week. It's all sort of blurry right now. And then developed also another two additional plants in Tanzania which were emergency power plants which were operating in Dodoma and Arusha. So we're now, I've got about 217 megawatts of installed capacity in Tanzania, which in the grand scheme of things when we talk about needs and capacity sounds very small, but in the Tanzanian context it's actually quite significant, particularly when they've suffered load shedding for the last three years, which has left huge parts of the country without power, primarily because the water and the dams has simply not been there. Whatever the reason, whether it be climate change, whether it be freak weather patterns the last few years, there just hasn't been enough rain. So when the water and the dams go down, they can't run the hydros, suddenly there isn't enough capacity on the grid, so you start load shedding. And that's what happens across Africa, which is why we see over and over again governments that are paying ridiculous amounts of money on emergency power projects, on diesel gensets, which are polluting and ridiculously expensive. But they need the power, essentially to keep the economy moving and to keep people happy. It's an economic issue, it's a political issue, and it's why it happens. And we stepped in to try to fill that gap in capacity. In Tanzania, we also have two very interesting biomass projects which we're implementing with our JV partner KMR infrastructure. These are small, as Ambassador Perry was saying, off-grid, actually they're not off-grid, they're isolated mini-grid projects. And they reflect sort of an ethos of our company, which is, as much as we're in these projects to do business, we're also creating jobs. We're also developing local communities and the economies there. We, through these projects, we expect to employ hundreds of people on bamboo plantations, develop outgrower schemes. So the community itself is all part of this process of generating electricity, and we're doing it at about half the price of what Tinesco's paying now in order to power these mini-grids with diesel gensets. We're also looking at projects in Malawi to develop also renewable energy projects there, and we're pretty far along in the development process there. And then we're in Nigeria, and we're in Nigeria big time. We were part of a consortium that won a tender in the first privatization round for a 972-megawatt plant in Ugele, and we're now looking at the second round to see whether there are assets there we're interested in acquiring. We are developing a project in Ghana. We're pretty much in every one of the Power Africa countries now or have plans to be. So that's sort of the background behind the company. You know, one of the, I will make one extra, one additional point about how we do business. As I said before, part of the ethos and part of the core business plan for us is to do development as much as we run businesses. And as a result of that ethos and how we translated that in Tanzania anyway, we built a training center in Moragoro, Tanzania, where we've now trained upwards, I forget the numbers, but it's easily between 200 to 400 Tanzanians to build overhead power lines to an international standard. We did it in partnership with the Linesman College in Idaho, the Northwest Linesman College. And we did that out of our own money. I mean, that was not part of the tender. We just decided that that's the way we ought to do business. We employed most of those people and whether we build another overhead line in Tanzania or not, and believe me, we would like to build more and we have plans to do more. We have left a workforce there that's 100% qualified to continue that work into the future no matter who's there doing it, whether they're Chinese, whether they're German, whatever. And we do that because it's the right thing to do. And obviously it helps our core business there. I mean, we're respected because we do that and that helps us on a number of fronts, but we are giving something back, I think, in a significant way. So that's sort of the general, and now I'll just, a few comments on the Power Africa initiative. Obviously we're thrilled by this. As we're an EPC contractor, we're also an IPP, but we're also a developer. So as I said, we're looking at developing a number of projects in various countries. And the most enormous benefit we see from this is getting a coordinated USG approach to all manner of the deal, the elements of making a deal, of doing a transaction. So we've been involved working with USAID, working with others as this has developed and we've seen it work. We've got a deal, I was talking about the biomass projects, which we're financing through OPIC and some other of the Meccany providers. And we've seen the process and we've been involved in the process and I think there are real results, certainly in the Washington end because there's a certain urgency and say, well, here's a deal, we've got a US investor, they've got a pipeline, how can we make this happen and how can we make it happen faster? So we're seeing that already. I think the in-country piece of it is going to be extremely important and as I understand it, I think it's gonna depend on the country, but the idea behind at least the USAID element of Power Africa is to put people within ministries, assuming that they're invited and requested and I understand Tinesco is eager to have somebody in the ministry and that person becomes the belly button for pushing deals through, pushing transactions. As anybody knows who's tried to do deals in Africa, the bench isn't always deep and it's hard to get the attention of the guy you need in order to move something forward and there may only be one guy who can do that. So if you've got somebody who becomes not only the local government focus person but also the private sector focus and the US government focus as to how to get that done, that person's gonna be able to move transactions forward and obviously there's also this important piece of capacity building, whether it's negotiating a PPA or working sovereign guarantee issues, whatever it is, that person who sits there is gonna be vital and Andy will be working with them and the folks in Washington will as well. And I think this element is key and it was something that came up in the president's remarks at our plan. What he said was, and the message he delivered to Tanzania, the message he delivered to other African governments involved in Power Africa was, you gotta move fast, this is an urgent issue. It is a key constraint to development, not just economic development but social development whether it's education, whether it's health across the board, it's about power. And the more that, the more bureaucracy there is, the more red tape there is, the slower things move, the harder it is to attract investment to Africa. Everybody knows the potential. I mean, I think we all look at whatever report whether it's in the economist or whether it's, whoever it is who's written these reports talks about the potential and we talk about the cell phones, we talk about all these analogies. But we all continually butter heads up against this sort of, I don't wanna call it lethargy, let's call it bureaucratic inertia. It's sort of a bureaucratic muddle where you're just trying to plow through and move things forward. So to the extent that the US government can have somebody on the ground within the ministries trying to move these things forward and leverages the political influence of the embassy, of the White House, of the aid mission, whoever it is and push things forward, I think you're gonna see real progress in all of these countries. There were a couple of points raised in the Q&A earlier and I think I just wanted to sort of pile on on a few of these things. I think someone mentioned equity and the difficulty in managing equity risk and finding equity and I'm gonna pair this to the comment that was raised about diaspora and how do you take advantage of the diaspora. You know, those two things go together. There is an enormous amount of equity that's out there in the diaspora. I mean, I think what you're finding, what we've found certainly in a place like Nigeria is that Nigerians are coming back to Nigeria in order to invest, in order to run funds, in order to invest. We have had, as Ambassador Perry said, there are Nigerian firms who are coming to him and saying, look, we wanna be part of the NIP. We wanna be part of this next round of privatization. How do we do it? Who can we do it with? And they're coming to us and they're saying, look, we've got the cash. We just don't have a technical partner. And so we're finding that the capital is out there. People wanna invest. Look, frankly, I think a lot of these projects, the IRR is high enough so that people are willing to assume a certain level of risk that they wouldn't assume other places. So we find that the equity is there. Obviously, there's a certain amount of management with regard to counterpart guarantees and we're hoping that we're gonna be able to work through a lot of that and that's gonna be a focus of the folks involved in the Power Africa Initiative. The final point, and this has probably gone well over my 10 minutes, but I tend to babble, so the final point is not necessarily the most important, but it's one that I think plays in here. As I said, the IRRs can be high because there's risk, okay? And most of that risk, there's a lot of risk in terms of owning and operating and securing the revenue off the project, getting your money from your off-taker, but there's just as much risk, certainly not in orders of magnitude the same, but in the development process. I mean, I've got a number of projects in development that quite frankly, from one day to the next, I don't know if they're gonna go anywhere. On Tuesday, I can be like, yeah, we're steaming ahead with this, we're gonna get a PPA, we know this is gonna happen, but then the next day, I'm 180 degrees and I don't know where we're gonna go with it. And that's the nature of developing power projects, particularly in Africa. So to the extent that the US government through Power Africa is able to do two things, it would be enormously helpful to investors. And the first is to mitigate some of that development risk through providing development capital. And it's one thing to say, well, yeah, you can go to USTDA and there's money in OPIC and we wanna do that. But USTDA and even TDA will tell you, I don't know if anybody from TDA is here, but it's hard work. There are a lot of restrictions on TDA money and it can be very challenging to get that money to do development, it can take over a year. So if you're trying to develop a power project, you can't necessarily wait to wear it. You can find that development money elsewhere or you just fund it off your balance sheet. So we need to find a way that we can streamline these processes within the US government to be able to put up development capital to get these projects moving. The second issue on development risk, I think the standard rule has always been about 10% and that you get a development fee of 10%, which essentially covers your risks. That's not always guaranteed, it changes. And I think the US government through this process has to find a way to price that risk better because everybody knows that the project's a little higher and I'm now probably getting a little too technical on this issue, but I think it's a key element that this initiative has to work through. But in the end, obviously we're thrilled to have been a part of this. We've gotten incredible exposure, I'm getting calls from people who want to work with us on this and that. And I've been on the phone ever since I got back and I think there are just enormous opportunities and it's not just for Symbian, I mean it's for any number of US companies that are willing to take advantage of this enormous opportunity that's in Africa and that the president is, I think, entirely accurately focused on. So with that I'll shut up and hand it over to Ben. Thank you Jennifer, it's great to be here. And Chris, if you went a few minutes over, that's great, you can have a couple of my minutes because everyone wants to hear from people that are actually doing the tough work on the ground. I'm extremely encouraged by the turnout here today. And the different, the wide spectrum of people that are brought to this issue, including on this table up front. And I think the reason for it is because this issue is at the heart of everything. Whether it's the private sector, whether it's the broader development process, et cetera. And at the one campaign, it's advocacy and grassroots organization of just under three and a half million people worldwide with a healthy contingent on the continent itself. This is something that has really, really resonated if we're talking about energy poverty in our parlance, has really resonated with our members over the last a year or so. And why is that? Well, we try to focus the policies, programs and work that we engage in on what ordinary Africans, African businesses and African governments are actually saying. What are they calling for? And we try our best to try and focus on those issues and see what we can do to help and drive. And on this particular issue, if you look at Afrobarometer surveys, one in five Africans say their most pressing concern is infrastructure with a healthy contingent on that, on power. If you look at African businesses, right around 50% say this is a major constraint to their operations. If you look at African governments, the energy sector power access affordability of electricity is in almost every single poverty reduction strategy paper or other kind of country blueprint for moving into middle income country status by 2020, 2030, whatever the overarching vision is. And you see multilateral bodies, whether they're on the region or elsewhere, that are heavily engaged on this issue. If you're talking about the African Union and January of 2012, coming out with the program for infrastructure development for Africa, the so-called PETA, with a very heavy component on energy or the UN sustainable energy for all issue or initiative. This is at the center of the discourse and we're absolutely thrilled that the US government is engaging on this issue. And largely it's because it touches all the issues that we focus on. So going back to Afrobarometer again, just under 40% of Africans that are surveyed say their most pressing concern are jobs or income related issues. Well, this touches that in a major way, touches health, touches education, touches agriculture if you're talking about irrigation or cold processing, cold storage, all those kinds of issues. So basically what we hear regularly is there is no path out of poverty or to prosperity without power, full stop. So you have got to engage on this issue. Now the US government is coming to this party probably a little bit late. Other actors like the African Development Bank have been all over the space for many years. World Bank, others, obviously China, but the US government can have a major, major impact in this sector in supporting those country-led plans and businesses, et cetera. And I emphasize supporting the country's own strategies in this context because that's where it's got to start, that's where it's got to end and figuring out a way to plug into those with participating private entities. And there's a number of plans that have come forward on this. So Power Africa, in our view, is a fantastic start, is a fantastic start. A bold announcement, but also what can only be a start. So it is very ambitious in its scale and its scope, but compared to the need, compared to the demand, it remains a very small piece of what has to happen. And obviously there's many players in this space, so everyone has a role to play. But as all the actors and all the participants to Power Africa focus on execution over the next 18 months, and you heard Andy before say that making sure that they have some wins under their belt is absolutely essential, of course. So while all the US government and others move to execution mode to make sure that this announcement actually has real tangible impact on the ground, not just tomorrow, not next year, but sustainability and commercial viability over the next, say, 10 years, need to be thinking about how to go to scale even more. So this announcement is quite interesting compared to previous US government announcements that I've spent a number of years in the government and have been a part of some of these announcements. The transaction-specific focus is really refreshing and it's gonna be challenging over the medium term to how it continues to harness and focus all the different vehicles and resources within the US government to support this effort. So it cuts both ways in some context. Like if you take a look at, say, a PEPFAR, very, very, very explicit metrics that flow throughout the US government and everyone knows what their targets are to drive towards this, some of that is there, some of it is not, which is gonna need to be addressed as you go to scale and continue ambition, to ratchet up ambition over the medium term. So that's where the Electrify Act that was introduced in Congress a couple of weeks ago comes in. And for us at the One Campaign, it's absolutely a critical. Everything that we do, if we're talking about in the US, is bipartisan. It's gotta have support from the right and the left because we know from painful practice over years that that is the only way that policies, programs, or whatever kind of action is gonna have stain power. And in this case, I think all indications point towards a very bipartisan, very big tent type of model on this particular issue. And the Electrify Africa Act is one political vehicle to actually drive that forward and to help make sure that there is stain power. Not just in terms of putting wind at the sails of this particular administration, but whoever follows, whether Democrat, whether Republican, will also have the rope, will have the support to continue these efforts. And as I mentioned before, to scale them. So beyond that, one of the things that we're very focused on now, again through this prism of scale ambition and delivering for what African people, businesses, and governments are asking for is, what are some of the impediments to fully harnessing the assets of the US government? And a number have already been mentioned, so I'm not gonna touch on those. One was equity, some of the things that Chris just mentioned in terms of project preparation, not necessarily even feasibility studies for project preparation, which is a very high risk part of the deal cycle. There's a number of those kinds of things. But a couple of additional pieces relate to the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, which was a modest part of the announcement from President Obama in Cape Town, and then some subsequent remarks in Tanzania. If you look in a, across a number of, for a number of different reasons, and I'll try and be quick and wrap it up and go, it was like Chris, I tend to ramble on. The OPIC needs to play a very significant part of any effort. Number of actors have very important parts to play, but there's a couple of things that OPIC does that are very unique for this space. One is it has longer tenor in terms of the financing. So there is a more of a match with the requirements for the sector, which is very medium to long term, and in terms of the financing needs. Some of the risk mitigation and the insurance products are very important in this space as well. In addition to that though, in a austere budgetary environment, there is no way in hell that USAID is gonna be able to get billions of dollars out of Congress in the foreseeable future to be able to support this. And frankly in many ways, outside of the capacity building and outside of some of the credit guarantees, I don't think you want USAID to go big in this space because it has to have a commercial viability nature to it. And the private sector is gonna have to be central to it if there's gonna be sustainability. We've, it's just painful practice and lessons that have come from that. There may be some cases for off-grid, micro-grid, things like that where subsidies in the medium and the near term may be required, but if you're talking about big scale, USAID is not gonna be your leading tip of the spear. An organization like OPIC is. OPIC is sitting on $15 billion of deployable capital. So the upside to scale in this space is gonna have to be, is gonna have to rest very heavily on OPIC. What are two of the constraints to OPIC? One is it just doesn't have enough bodies. It's a small, it's a small agency. Doesn't have enough deal teams to help drive some of these transactions. So that's gotta be addressed. The second thing is one that was actually brought up before on this emissions cap. Now, the scale of the magnitude of this issue is such that it's gonna take a mix to hit what the demand is on the continent. It's gonna take a mix. It's gonna take a mix of renewables. It's gonna take a mix of non-renewables. And when there is an environment where renewables are the commercially best solution, the viable and the resources are there, then absolutely, I think everyone would wish that that is the preferred model of generation and then feeding into transmission. There are gonna be some cases where that might not be the case, whether it's NAT gas, or basically NAT gas is gonna need to be a part of the mix. If you look at what the UN says, the IEA, UN Sustainable Energy for All, other actors that have opined on this from a very credible authoritative stance, that everyone calls for a mix. So in this case, having OPIC be able to support the mix of solutions that African governments are themselves asking for and trying to pursue I think is important. Within that, though, is strong an emphasis on the renewable aspect as well, wherever possible, wherever appropriate, is gonna be really important. So whatever the type of approach to address this constraint at the end of the day, I think there's many, many ways to do it, many, many ways that can be win-win and bring all parties to the table, whether it's development groups, environmental groups, businesses, et cetera. I think there's a way to skin that cat and we hope that that will be able to come to fruition at some point and then look forward to engaging with a number of parties on that front. So thank you, Jennifer. Thank you, Ben and Sarah. Thank you, thanks very much. I just wanted to say thank you to Jennifer and the rest of the group here for allowing me to be on a panel with such an amazing group of people doing very, very interesting work that is totally different from what I do on a day-to-day basis. So one of the things I wanted to do in sort of answering the question of why am I up here, what does this have to do with energy and climate change? It's interesting for me because I actually feel like while most of what we've heard about the Power Africa initiative so far has to do with it being transactional, whichever one likes that word, it's really sexy and it sounds like you're gonna do stuff and I think that's something that we see as sort of being politically palatable for most of the big initiatives that we see going forward. I actually think what people really wonder about the initiative is, is it strategic? Does it have staying power? Is it something we're going to do for a while and is it going to work? And I actually, when we were talking about this internally and looking at the initiative, I actually think there's a number of ways in which Power Africa makes a lot of sense, not only with what we see in terms of the energy and climate change goals of this administration, but also in terms of how they've adjusted to sort of a changing energy landscape. And so what I thought I would do is maybe add some food for thought to the conversation. I can't do what these guys did. It's amazing. I don't operate in that business and I think that all of those comments were tremendously insightful. So I'm gonna sort of go back up to the 30,000 foot view for a moment and say, why does this match with what the Obama administration is trying to do? And from my perspective, I've watched this administration for a long time, basically trying to look at a world where you're trying to find places where transformative change can happen, both from an economic perspective and a technology perspective. And a lot of that is low carbon driven, but it's not un-pragmatic. And so when you see what the Obama administration just sort of announced within their own sort of climate change strategy, you see a world in which they definitely believe in trying to drive low carbon energy sources, but they also are rarely aware of the fact that there's a lot of new unconventional oil and gas resources out there and hydrocarbon based resources that they need to sort of be able to compete with. So how can we look at this as being a strategy that makes sense with some intellectual underpinning that gives people some confidence that maybe it's a good idea for us to be spending a large amount in sort of US dollar terms, government money at a time when that's not, a lot of that isn't around to be spent and how it may leverage additional funds. And so I just wanted to touch on a few key issues. So why power Africa? Well, like Willie Sutton said, why do you rob banks? That's where the money is, right? When you look at the big global issues out there to be tackled, power generation issues in Africa, this may be the time where things are different. There is an exuberance out there in the terms of the economic growth that you're starting to see in different parts of Africa. I don't fundamentally think that a transaction based approach versus regulatory reform approach, I think we oscillate between those two things throughout the history of US development efforts, but that's not to mean that one is right and one is wrong. We've never tried it this way before in 2013 during this time in Africa's development cycle. So there's a lot of hope that can potentially be predicated there, but of the 1.3 billion people around the world that don't have access to electricity, 47% of those people are in Africa, right? And if you actually look at most of the literature that's being done in this issue, it's a small number of countries within Africa, right? And if you go out to 2030, you're actually seeing a good deal of progress in terms of connecting more people to modern electricity resources. But a lot of that, even though there is in aggregate terms, progress being made in Africa, a lot of that isn't actually happening in Africa to the same extent that it's happening in other places. So if you're gonna pick a problem to sort of put your shoulder behind and push, this isn't a bad one. The other thing that's often a criticism of the strategy, which I actually think may potentially be the brilliance behind it if we're able to do it correctly, is yeah, $7 billion, $9 billion, that's not a lot of money. You know what, there's a lot of money. $16.6 trillion, right? That's the amount of money that's gonna go into the energy sector for the electric power supply services side between now and 2030, according to just a normal reference case view of the future. The one thing that's not determined inside those dollar figures is how much of that comes from different companies or different governments, how that money gets spent, how it's divided among fuels. The point is, is that there's a lot of money out there in the energy sector. And when you start to look at where the competition for who's gonna be spending that money gets broken down in a lot of that money is gonna get spent in rapidly emerging developing economies and developing economies, right? So the question is, how do you spend small amounts of money? Which in the Power Africa initiative sort of is sort of comparison between the $7 billion that you're putting on the table to the $300 billion that might eventually be needed to achieve universal access within the region. How do you use the sort of the combination of the private sector and the public sector within a US perspective to try and create investment frameworks where US companies have a competitive advantage. And so people who were talking about how we partner with other places like the African Development Bank or like China or like other countries with specific interest in getting a foothold in those markets, instead of thinking about it as a small amount of money that doesn't really match up to the need, think about it in terms of what would you do and what US companies would do to try and get a foothold in some of those emerging markets and how do you make that possible? And I think that's actually the real sort of exciting part of the initiative. The other thing is it's not necessarily bad for climate change. There's a lot of sort of subtext here about, gee, this Power Africa initiative because it's coming from the Obama administration really only means that it can be clean energy based, right? Because the Obama administration cares about doing something about climate change and in their climate change strategy they've basically said they don't want to finance coal-fired power generation units in countries other than sort of the least developed countries and only when there's not sort of an economic disadvantage to doing an alternative. Well, the intellectual underpinning behind the Power Africa initiative actually looks at the vast majority of the places where you might spend that money being in rural applications and a lot of those remote rural applications being places where maybe those alternative technologies are more competitive. I think that's a case that has to be proven and proven on the ground. A lot of people can say that but it needs to actually be proven in practice. You can't really prove the counterfactual either so you actually have to go out and do that. But I think if you look at sort of the basic assumptions behind what it would take to actually achieve universal electrification around the world and not only in Africa, we had Kandey Mkela here when we were doing the sustainable energy for all initiative and basically said the greenhouse gas emissions really are less than 1% increase of where we would be in 2030. Now the presumption there is that that case of a lot of this rural electrification coming from non-fossil based energy sources is actually proves to be true. I think that the really important part about that maybe giving this initiative staying power is that if you're gonna do something about climate change you're gonna have to prove those cases and the best places to prove those cases are in places with economies that are growing quickly. That's not here. That's in a lot of other places around the world and rather than looking at that as being sort of an ideologically driven exercise, it could be looked at as a way of trying to catalyze some of this new innovation. So the other thing is the last point I was gonna make is sort of this sort of making advantage of energy resources in sort of a shifting energy landscape. I think one of the least sort of mentioned within sort of development circles but certainly gets a lot of attention in my world are places in Africa with significant energy resources and whether or not one the money from those resources are being used appropriately to sort of develop the electricity infrastructure within those countries but then two places where new finds have been discovered especially of natural gas in particular and figuring out ways to use that as a catalytic effort for development within those countries. Act fast, a lot of gas out there. So I think that one of the really important things to do is to make sure that you keep some of these development prospects especially within the oil and gas side in context. The oil and gas landscape is changing dramatically and the competitive landscape is changing dramatically and so being able to get that mix right between what governments can require of companies to not only build out that infrastructure and utilize those resources now is not the same conversation as it's always been. It's a very sort of competitive landscape out there so we can talk more about that as well but that's what I wanted to say real quick. Great, thank you very much. And again, lots of food for thought and a lot of different perspectives on that. I think we've got about 35 minutes now for questions and answers so we'll take rounds of questions again once again and we'll begin with a gentleman here. If you could wait for the mic and please identify yourself before you ask your question. Yes, I teach government at Georgetown. Let me ask the question I was going to ask earlier which is where is the $7 billion coming from and is it likely to detract from other programs such as humanitarian programs in Africa? I, Sarah could answer that I think or perhaps Ben. Let me ask Sarah. A reporter from The Voice of America. Question is for Mr. Kempenover if I get your name right and Mr. Leo mentioned that compared to China and other actors US came to Africa a little bit late so I'm just wondering could you tell me from the business perspective do you see a competition from China there? Thank you. Hi, this is Gene Eckhart with National Electrical Manufacturers Association. So I was just wondering if and I don't know who on the panel might do this could let us know if there's already an existing say portfolio of prioritized projects that these six countries have identified and work has been done on it that they know what they need in their countries. Thank you. Rick's here with Scribe Strategies and Advisors. With a couple of exceptions what I hear from the panel is unbridled optimism about this initiative. Do any of you have any doubts or fears about unintended consequences or failure? Not yet, anyway. Let's see, why don't we go down the panel and if you want to pass just say so and tackle the question. I'll take the 1-0 from over here. Okay, good. Imagine Delta holding as a tender out for 10 power plants July 19th deadline. These are existing plants some of them have been updated and the government policy to privatize and Nigerian companies consortiums are looking for US partners. That's the only situation where I know something immediate coming up but I imagine there are other opportunities in other countries also. Thank you. Tackle the ones you've seen most fit. I think just to respond to your question I think my understanding is the Power Africa team they're focused on a number of projects that they're trying to push forward. I would expect that things are as transparent as possible and there's certainly an entree there to say well, who are the guys you're talking to? Because everybody's, if you're looking for Exim Bank financing you're gonna need to source a lot of materials right here in the US. So those are opportunities. The two questions that were sort of directed towards me the competition from China. Look, I don't see it as competition. I mean, look, as an EPC contractor we obviously compete with Chinese companies and have competed with Chinese companies and in fact we submitted a bid today for a contract in Tanzania and I'm sure there are Chinese contractors who are doing it and it's tough for us to compete with Chinese contractors as a US company. We're more expensive at the end of the day but we also tend to use equipment which is more reliable but you gotta pay for that, right? And so I think overall at the macro level I don't see it as competition. I think the Chinese companies and the Chinese government has done amazing things in Africa, I mean in terms of roads and infrastructure but there's so much work to be done that it's not really a matter of competition. The fact is we've come late to the game in a way because as everybody knows the development projects and the infrastructure projects in Africa have been an element of Chinese foreign policy so they've been able to provide very low interest loans to get this stuff done by Chinese contractors and we just don't have that system so we're more expensive. It's harder, it's just a different kind of an approach to doing development in Africa but overall I wouldn't call it competition. There's just so much work to be done that there are certainly opportunities for partnerships and everybody could pull off a piece and be doing work together. I'll give you an example. In Tanzania right now the Chinese are constructing a gas pipeline from Matuara to Dar es Salaam. Well, everybody who owns power plants is looking forward to that happening because there's gonna be more gas in Dar es Salaam to run our power plants. We don't have to run them off of jet fuel, right? So that's an element of not necessarily cooperation but it's shared infrastructure that everybody will benefit from. Doubts or fears about unintended consequences or failures? Absolutely not. Of course, I mean, yeah. The one thing is Ben and I are both familiar with this from our sort of careers in government and he even mentioned it. Lots of initiatives come out of the US government. We've been involved in them and there's always the danger that people lose interest and it was a great initiative. Everybody got really excited, it was super sexy and then the money just doesn't show up. We're not funding it anymore or things happen but I think in this context this is something that's too important and it's become such a signature initiative and has so much bipartisan support that I think the risk of that happening with this initiative is fairly low. All you've gotta do is look at PEPFAR, right? I mean, that was a Bush administration initiative that's been going strong for quite some time because it was the right way to do it and it had the support of African governments of civil society, of the development community, everybody and it's continuing to go fairly strongly. So now I'll hand it over. I think most of the key points have been hit on maybe just one or two things to add on additional. In terms of where the money is coming from and is there any risk on humanitarian programs, so obviously for our organization we work on many different issues, global health, agriculture, a number of other things so we have a number of priorities and this would be an issue that we'd be very focused on. In this case, we haven't seen any tangible risk in the near term while kind of see how it plays out over time in terms of how much legs this initiative gets and how it transforms over time but most of the resources that were announced are don't require congressional appropriations so they're not grant resources. Most of them actually will make the US government money. Of that announcement I would suspect not knowing the financial engineering for all the commitments, that this thing will be net positive to the deficit because of profits coming in from XM and profits coming in from OPIC and a very modest portion coming from USAID, the African Development Foundation and a couple of others which is actually quite an interesting model in the austere environment in which the government in this town is operating it and that feeds into some of the bipartisan support that you'll probably see on this. So I don't see any risk right now but it's something to watch going forward in subsequent stages. On the China competition, so the one thing that I just, I think Chris hit on this adequately, the one thing that I would say though is I didn't necessarily mean that the US government is late to the continent, just late to this particular issue. Late to this particular issue. Been obviously a leader on so many other issues on the continent but behind the power curve on the power sector, pun intended. In terms of unintended consequences, one of the things that, or challenges or risks I guess instead of unintended consequences, there are so many risks on some of these projects that from the One Campaign's perspective we're quite worried about and I'll just mention one or two. First is now that this issue has gained so much prominence in this country in the development context. It's been in the space in Germany and France and Japan and other places but not so much in America that there are some successes and that this continues to go forward and to be incorporated into the core, the core sections of how this place does development. And for all the reasons that I mentioned before in terms of just responding to what everyone wants, this is like at the center of the Venn diagram. Like how could you not be working on this issue? So if there are a couple of projects that don't hit the mark, fail for whatever reason, very worried about what the consequences could mean over the medium to long term. I'll stop at that point. Two really quickly, yeah. If I seemed overly excited about the initiative, I was doing a good job of trying to be positive. I just meant it made sense. I don't think it has any greater likelihood of succeeding than any of the other one of these we've seen in recent memory, right? But I don't think that means that it has a good chance of failing either or you shouldn't be doing it, right? And so there's some really good analogies for what could happen that would not go well with this, right? I mean, we have some analogies on the energy side of doing project based spending and with lots of exuberance that didn't go so well that was very politically picked up in this town and has done a lot in terms of what we're able to put into R&D spending on the clean energy side. So project based funding is always a really dicey things to do from that perspective. You know, the thing that I get worried about with these initiatives, and this is because of my government background, is anytime you make like a focal point initiative that the president cares about and usually is connected with a trip, does it suck energy away from other people who've just been doing this work for a long period of time, right? Or does it actually get people catalyzed around a new sort of direction and a new way of thinking about doing something? And I think this is why it's really, really, really important to not only say, you know, I'm having an interagency meeting every single week to make sure that we're all talking to each other, which is fantastic, but I think the vast majority of the American public would be shocked that you weren't doing that in the first place, is talk to people who have money that they want to invest in large quantities on a very, very, very regular basis. And I have no doubt that that's happening too. And also just be really transparent about, you know, the strategic thinking and the creative thinking that you're putting into these processes because it's not like any one initiative like this is gonna crack the development nut. I'm not in the development world, so that's not, I don't mean to say that glibly, but you gotta keep working at it, right? And being transparent about, you know, the intellectual discourse that's going behind these things, I think is actually a really helpful thing for everybody to get involved in, even from a political standpoint here in Washington. And finally, the competition with China thing, I think, yeah, absolutely. And I hope there's more of it. Americans respond really, really well to competition unless they respond really, really badly. But you have to choose one of those. And I'm gonna vote for really, really well. So I think that we should figure out what our competitive advantage is and go for it. Thank you. Just on the risk side too. I mean, you know, so much of this relies as Ambassador Perry said at the start from the response from the African governments. And, you know, you've gotta wonder why they have not gotten the act together on the power sector for decades. When for decades it's been this monumental obstacle. And some countries, and Kenya is one of them, I think, has been working kind of incrementally, but it's taken a good 10, 15 years for them to get kind of the regulatory structure in place. They've taken some hard decisions and Andrew mentioned kind of cost-reflective tariffs that are politically difficult. You look at, you know, Nigeria, every Nigerian president comes in and makes power. That's gonna be top of their platform and it quickly bogs down into vested interests and the difficulty of disentangling, you know, privatizing the sector, uncoupling various pieces of it together. So one of the big risks is maybe the ambition of putting a kind of a transactional advisor into one of these ministries and expecting this young energetic American to try to turn massive bureaucracy around in a way. And that focus on the transactional that, you know, a project by project approach is important, but for it ultimately to hang together, you need a kind of a sector-wide reform and these difficult political choices that need to get made. And if you start to hit that wall or the bureaucratic morass that you were talking about, you know, you can see kind of some of the energy kind of leaking out of this a little bit and too many of that and kind of the good feeling and momentum that's happening right now begins to fade away. So it's always great to start this out optimistic and I think, you know, what is it that will make this work, what's needed to make it work both from the US, from the US Congress, from the private sector and from African partners and African governments and African constituencies and, you know, engaging civil society, I think in these countries and saying, what's at stake here and what's the opportunity and how do you, you know, what's the importance of keeping, holding your government to account to make this work is incredibly important as well. So creating a constituency for power within Africa that's organized, vocal and politically connected, I think is really important. We, let's take another round of questions. Now, we're gonna go to the, we'll, well, he got a shot at the first, but okay, we'll go with you again. Okay. You have an advocate. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. This is Dr. Nisar Chaudhary and I find Christopher in this jam packed room, the most optimistic and the most realistic person. And my question, I would like to ask him, the countries in Africa and any third world countries, the Chinese are there anywhere and they're going everywhere virtually. Their quality of work and the prices are relatively cheaper. And then they have sharpened their skills to navigate their course everywhere in the world. In the countries you're dealing with, you talked of bureaucracy, hurdle, rat-tapism and the third is corruption. How do you navigate your course and overcome these hurdles while competing with Chinese? Because your quality is superior, you're generally, because of that, the contract is of a higher price. Thank you. Thank you so much. My name is Raymond Maro, I'm from Tanzania and volunteer for East African Community and also a student of International Relations. My question goes straight to Mr. Christopher who has been in Tanzania and talking about power Africa, especially powering the electricity in Tanzania. I have been in Tanzania for almost five years and issue of electricity is really critical. And since you have been there from the Ubungo plant power, what strategies have you laid down because the common citizens in Tanzania are today, their daily cry is the electricity. It shows that the government has failed and if your company has been there working now of like for four years, what strategies are you laying? Because many people in Tanzania now they are focusing on Chinese projects. They say the Chinese ones comes here, they don't talk. They give the work and you give the timeline, you'll see something's happening. But now in Tanzania, people are thinking even suggesting the government to privatize the Tanesco company because has been an issue with Tanesco, with the parliament, with the private companies on the electricity. Obama coming to Tanzania in my own country, I was privileged to see really America is going to help Africa or we are just having another talk shows continuing. Thank you. There's your skepticism for, and then the lady on the aisle. I'm Elizabeth Harbell, I'm a reporter with Climate Wire and I have another question from 30,000 feet. Something I'm still kind of unclear about is, I mean you talk about the importance of a portfolio, Mr. Leo, of course, and I'm just, I'm still unsure how much of that portfolio is going to be renewables and how much is going to be oil and gas. When you look at the White House fact sheet, a fairly small proportion of that money is specifically earmarked for renewables. So I guess wonder realistically, what are we looking at for renewables as we go forward with this? Thank you. I'm Hank Cohen. I'm associated with the Contra Global Corporation which, like Symbion, is a pioneer investor in power in Africa. We're generating power and selling it in five African countries right now. And we're extracting gas from Lake Kivu in a new technology that we invented. And we're now currently looking at gasification of LNG as a low-cost way of getting rid of heavy fuel oil. So we're very active. But to get to my question, I seriously doubt the value of including Ethiopia in this six country mix. We've been going there every year for five years offering to invest in private power generation and we've been refused each time. It's a Marxist-Leninist regime that has absolutely no interest in private investment in power. So why did the United States choose that company? I hereby make a motion that we switch to Cote d'Ivoire right away. All in favor. Chris, you wanna start off? Sure, I'll jump in. I'll start with Ethiopia. I mean, look, maybe this is a way of trying to move that forward. I mean, we've both been hearing probably for years now that that's gonna change, right? And there are moves afoot for the Ethiopian government to try to start allowing IPPs. Maybe, and again, I'm just guessing, just like you, that it's the idea to try to incentivize them to do this. Hey, the money's there, let's start trying to do some projects. I'm gonna go down the list here. How do we deal with the issues raised by competition with China? And I'll leave it at that. You know, we're a U.S. company and we can't do things that other companies can do and that other companies do do. You know, whether they're Chinese or whoever they are. And essentially what we have to do is we develop relationships and maintain those relationships and we also do it through how we do business and that has real value, I think, in a lot of African countries because I think it is in stark contrast to the way a lot of Chinese contractors operate. And I really do believe that that makes a difference and it's sort of making the business case for being a responsible business and sort of investing back in the communities and doing things and that's been real valuable for us. And I think that's how we've managed that issue. But make no mistake, it does take longer, right? I mean, there are certain things that you can get done as another company that we can't do and so that just takes a long time. To get our invoice to that top of that stack, we've just got to be in there nonstop saying, hey, hey, hey, hey, others don't have to do that. It's a brown envelope, it makes it a lot easy. What are we doing in Tanzania? Look, you know, what's the strategy? We are continuing to do everything to keep the lights on. We'll be in a position where, you know, we haven't been paid by Tinesco for all the reasons that you are very well familiar with, you know, that are contributing to the calls for privatization of Tinesco and it's difficult. I mean, the organization needs serious reform and I think even people within Tinesco will tell you that. There's some great people in that organization. But it hasn't been up to par. I think, you know, this issue where we talked about cost-reflective tariffs that Andy raised, that's an important element in cash flow and revenue for Tinesco. And so what we do is like, you know, we've made commitment to the president and we're gonna keep the lights running. So, you know, we've had to manage it off our balance sheet to put fuel in the gen sets, to buy jet A for our bungalow plant and we've kept them running even when we haven't been paid by Tinesco. And again, that goes to the point here, which is sort of how we're staying in there. You know, we, as a result of the way we've done business in Tanzania, we've signed an MOU with the government to develop a 400 megawatt plant in Toira. And, you know, there's a lot of gas in Nasi Bay. And we wanna take advantage of that and be able to power the south. I mean, part of that project is to build over 650 kilometers of transmission lines to go from Toira all the way across the south to Sangea. And so, you know, that's a strategy to try to generate power and push it into the grid from the south. So, you know, we're there for the long term. And so, you know, that's been our strategies and investor and we just keep the lights on and as much as it hurts sometimes. Can I just wanna jump in the question on the portfolio about renewables? I think someone raised in the back there. Yeah, I mean, just to stress the point that there's gotta be a mix. And just when I went down this list, Ben has this really great list of all the African countries installed capacities and just in average tariffs, right? So, the retail tariff for residentials. And this is the real challenge with renewables. I just went down this list and I said, okay, how many countries have a tariff which is over 17 cents? Now, I'm pulling that out of the air because it's pretty hard to do a renewable project for a tariff less than 17 cents, right? I mean, that's a trick to get the IRR that's gonna attract investors. There are only six out of 26 countries, right? So, how do you make a renewable energy project commercially viable when that's what their retail tariff is? The retail tariff is way lower than when it's gonna cost me to develop a project and sell electricity at a rate that makes it commercially viable. So, unless you subsidize the tariffs heavily and there's a lot of instruments out there that enable us to do that, whether it's through the AFTB or the IFC or whoever it is, these projects really aren't, renewable energy projects aren't right now commercially viable. I mean, they are in certain circumstances. I'm not gonna say across the board they're not commercially viable. So, your mix at the outset is by nature, just the sheer economics of it, your mix is gonna be low. And that leads to a point I think that Ben was making, yeah, I'm sorry to drag, I'm a sort of moderator's nightmare, but that, you know, we started talking about OPIC. Real important issue is carbon cap and I didn't raise it in my issue before, I was trying to stay away from it, but it's controversial, but OPIC is this enormous amount of debt that's there that we could take advantage of, that we wanna take advantage of. But, you know, if I've got a six or $700 million project or whatever it is, and it runs off of gas, I don't have access to OPIC because of the carbon cap, right? So where, so it sort of asks this question, you know, this goes back to will this fail, right? And I think, you know, that's a real risk because there's a major commitment here, but as we've been saying, the gas is there. There's gas in a lot of these countries and we've gotta find a way to be able to take advantage of that gas in a way that's commercially viable and we're able to finance it through Power Africa. It's possible it's gonna take work, but I think these are the real challenging issues that people have to focus on. I'll shut up now. On the carbon cap, I'm gonna give you an example of something that worked, I think, without too much US government support, multi-country project. And that was a pipeline from Bolivia taking natural gas to Sao Paulo. So they worked through three countries, Bolivia, Paraguay, I think Argentina also and Brazil to the delivery. It was done by Enron. I know they got a bad name now, but they figured out how to mobilize private capital to get a project done. It meant working with governments to get the regulatory framework right, addressing, I don't know how they did it, environmental concerns to run pipeline through to Pantanal, but it got done and it's making money. I think you can find similar situations in Africa. If you get a market that is willing to pay, which he's getting out of the tariff thing, then investment bankers can come in and do things that maybe USG agencies can't. But there has to be a demand and a market price for it. Really quickly on the OPIC thing, you know, so you either believe that in some of these places where access to electricity and what's your definition of access to electricity is really important here, is commercially competitive through non-fossil based energy sources or you don't, right? And so some policies allow you to test that theory while others just make it more difficult for people to access money on the other side, right? And so I think that one of the big questions here is is the OPIC cap a vestige of a different time when we were basically looking at building up support within various US government agencies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We were doing it in a lot of different ways. And OPIC was applauded as loudly as it's being derided right now for exactly this cap. And so the question is, you know, how do you sensibly try and incentivize low-carbon energy technologies in different places? And is that necessarily, is that something that makes sense in this new framework that we're seeing rolled out in a lot of places or is it something that's just making it problematic? And I think that's an ongoing debate, obviously. But again, we sort of go back and forth between this world where we actually believe that some of these technologies and these sources are cost competitive in these rural and remote applications or they're not. And I actually think we need to prove that on a case-by-case basis in lots of different places over and over again. And that's what competition in the private sector are about. So I think the role for government is to figure out how to best play in that and not be overly prescriptive, but. I just want to add one or two sentences on points that Sarah made. In terms of, A, what we're talking about for access and then where the US government and others should be focusing. So as always, it's complicated or complex or whatever, but yes, it is the rural and off-grid areas. It's also urban. So this should never only be a rural access issue because if that's what you're talking about, then maybe solar lanterns might be a nice stop-gap. If you talk to the people in the villages, they'll say thanks for the solar lantern and that's not enough because that's a cell phone for me for a little bit of time. That's not transformational. I want to be able to start a small firm or do whatever, whatever, whatever. So where the government should be focusing and how access is defined, I think is really important. But when I said a mix before at the very top, I also was intending or intimating a mix in rural, urban, grid, off-grid, all these kinds of things. It's across the spectrum and the issue from our perspective is just simply let's not handicap ourselves in terms of being able to push on certain issues because it's gonna be appropriate and customized according to different circumstances across geographies, across countries, across market dynamics. So it's gonna require a lot of creativity and a lot of different vehicles is our point. We are at time and this is just being fascinating to me and thank you all so much for joining us. I do hope we can take Andrew up on his suggestion that we reconvene in a year and take a look back. But I hope we'll be working on this in the interim and drawing on your expertise through that process. Please join me in thanks for being here.