This initiative aims to turn Africa into a hub for climate action

Conversations on how to tackle the climate emergency often focus on how the world’s largest economies can reduce emissions.

Low- and middle-income countries tend to only come up in the context of adaptation — adjusting to the effects of climate change — or financing to help them recover from loss and damage.

But one entrepreneur believes that Africa can put a major dent in global emissions, in a way that supports its own economic transformation while helping the world avoid a climate disaster.

James Irungu Mwangi, who founded the Climate Action Platform-Africa, or CAP-A, last year, says countries across the continent have an important role to play in the global climate agenda — not just as recipients of aid, but as drivers of climate action.

The public benefit organization highlights how the continent can leverage its unique assets — from land and natural resources to an exploding and educated young workforce, to an abundance of renewable energy potential.

“One of the things that can do the most to accelerate global net zero is having Africa not stay close to net zero, which is where it is right now, but actually have Africa go massively net negative,” he said.

CAP-A’s aim is to work with partners to develop and implement projects that demonstrate the feasibility of scaling up climate mitigation solutions. It is building evidence to help decision-makers identify, quantify, and prioritize climate actions on the African continent. While it’s early days, the team hopes to “strengthen the Africa-centric opportunity narrative.”

Based in Nairobi, Kenya, Mwangi was recently in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, for the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP 27, where he shared details on CAP-A in one-on-one conversations and events such as Carbon Removals: Pioneers in the Global South. 

Last month, Mwangi was announced as one of the recipients of the Climate Breakthrough Award, the largest climate action grant for individuals. This $3 million, multiyear grant — which supports early-stage climate mitigation efforts that may be seen as too risky for traditional funders — represented the most significant backing of his vision to date.

Mwangi is also co-founder and executive director of Dalberg Group, a global development consultancy, which offers global consulting services that for two decades has worked to raise living standards in low-resource settings.

Climate action opens opportunities for Africa

The idea to start CAP-A emerged from what Mwangi describes as a “crisis of faith.”

In late 2019, after nearly two decades of consulting on job creation in Africa, Mwangi saw the limitations of the work he was undertaking, from making it easier for farmers to borrow or women to access credit or youth to be trained in digital skills.

Mwangi, who has spent his career seeking opportunities to transform his home continent and its role in the global economy, realized this project-based work was not adding up to the kind of systems change he envisioned.

“Each project ends with some ideas and a number,” he said. “I decided just for the heck of it to add up what we were seeing and apply a very generous discount to it and then compare it to the demographic challenge.”

The exercise underlined that a new approach was needed to unlock job opportunities on the continent.

Alongside colleagues at Dalberg, Mwangi worked to identify what force might help the continent climb from being on the lowest rung of the ladder in global value chains.

Countries with big populations, which buy finished goods in the same proportion as they ship out raw materials, cannot escape poverty, he said.

Meanwhile, carbon intensity, or the amount of greenhouse gases emitted per unit of energy consumed, was becoming an increasingly vital consideration for countries around the world.

“That's a massive disruption,” Mwangi said. “And whenever you have a massive disruption like that, you love it if you were at the back of the race before, because you have nothing to lose.”

Mwangi asked his team at Dalberg to explore areas where Africa could be competitive on decarbonization and climate action more broadly.

“To my surprise, what kept coming back was that it was hard to come up with a sector where the imperatives of climate action did not increase African competitiveness or create new revenue lines,” he said.

What began as a crisis of faith turned into a leap of faith, as the need for something like CAP-A became clear.

Mwangi and his colleagues saw ways that Africa could shift to low-emissions consumption and production, use this green manufacturing capacity to produce for the world, and remove carbon not just through nature-based solutions but also investment in carbon removal technologies.

For example, rather than exporting raw materials for heavy metal processing, one of the most energy-intensive activities on the planet, African countries could move those activities onshore and build a green grid from the start.

By making these kinds of shifts, Africa could drive needed progress on climate action while also creating tens of thousands of new jobs, and making African manufacturing competitive.

How the platform took shape and what challenges lie ahead

From those early conversations within Dalberg, CAP-A started to take shape.

Last year, Mwangi and his CAP-A co-founder Carlijn Nouwen, a colleague at Dalberg, put together a data tool demonstrating the continent’s potential as a hub for climate action in terms of revenue, jobs, and tons of carbon removal. It was geared toward everyone who seeks data to guide their decision-making — such as investors, donors, and governments — and lacked models for the impact of climate action in Africa.

Within a week of that tool going live, they had speaking invitations to COP 26 in Glasgow. Mwangi and Nouwen started talking about how they might build upon the prototype. CAP-A was officially launched last year, with Dalberg Catalyst as its fiscal sponsor. This year it hired Jack Kimani, formerly of the Clinton Health Access Initiative, as CEO.

Since then, the Climate Action Platform-Africa has partnered with groups including the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, and the Africa team of the U.N. High-Level Champions Office.

“In each case, what we’re doing is something they haven’t had before, an Africa-focused analytical case why what they’re doing makes substantial and sustainable economic sense,” Mwangi said.

CAP-A seeks to be an orchestrator, helping facilitate the connections and conversations that are needed for this vision of Africa’s role in global climate action to become a reality.

Also, CAP-A’s team can speak to the priorities of leaders across policy, climate activism, and business — “We’re trilingual,” Mwangi said —  so they can take action in order to make this transformation happen.

But if African countries want to seize these opportunities, they will need new business leaders, businesses, and business models, he added.

“Unfortunately at this point, there is a big gap in terms of getting those businesses set up, equipping local entrepreneurs with the perspectives they need, and connecting them with new revenue models and so on,” Mwangi said.

Most of these climate-related businesses in Africa were not started by people from the continent, he added, noting how these businesses will only scale if they are started by local people who understand these markets, and have the right enabling environment in place.

While Mwangi founded CAP-A and will remain heavily involved, he does not draw a salary from the organization. He told Devex he plans to build the team, raise money, and step away.

“My role is to say, as this ecosystem is being brought into existence, can my partners and I bring new businesses and business models that can thrive in this ecosystem that is being built, and invite others to do the same?” he said.

Mwangi said his next step will involve helping Africa’s climate action entrepreneurs access the knowledge and capital they need to scale. He’s exploring the launch of “a venture builder” that will help scale climate startups on the continent.

If massive climate enterprises don’t come into being soon, the continent could miss out, Mwangi said.

“There's nothing that says this opportunity is the continent’s birthright,” he said. “They could go elsewhere, not because those places are better, but just because they started first.”