Cape Town – 17 June 2026. At the Africa Energy Forum (AEF) in Cape Town, UNDP Rome Centre convened a high-level panel of senior policymakers, multilateral financial institutions, and market practitioners to examine practical, transaction-level solutions to one of Africa's most persistent development challenges: moving clean energy projects from preparation to financial close. 

The 75-minute session, titled "Closing the Risk Gap: Pragmatic Financial Solutions for Bankable IPPs," brought together voices from government, specialist financial institutions, and the private sector to move beyond diagnosing barriers and focus on what works. Discussions centred on instruments that are already operational in African markets, including long-term foreign exchange hedging, private aggregation models, liquidity guarantees, and MDB-backed risk mitigation tools, and on how these can be combined, replicated, and deployed at scale. 

"Africa has no shortage of ambitious projects. What this session showed is that the financial instruments to bring them to close already exist. The task now is to combine them deliberately, replicate what works, and make sure the countries and developers who need them most can actually access them. That is exactly what Energy for Growth and PISTA are built to do." Stated Francis Denning from UNDP Rome Centre. 

The session opened with remarks from Francis Dennig, Energy Finance Lead at UNDP Rome Centre, who framed the international policy and development finance context for mobilising private capital into African energy markets. A keynote conversation with Eng. Mafayo Ziba, Director of Energy at Zambia’s Ministry of Energy and Dr. Eng Fenwicks Musonye Deputy Director for Energy Efficiency at Kenya’s Energy & Petroleum Regulatory Authority, explored how policy and regulatory reforms can improve project bankability while safeguarding the financial sustainability of utilities. 

The panel discussion brought together leading market practitioners, including Susana Lopez Lopez (ReLP), Ana Hajduka (Africa GreenCo), Demba Tandia (TCX), and Obbie Banda (Regional Liquidity Support Facility – RLSF). Drawing on real and near-executed transactions, panelists shared insights on risk mitigation instruments, aggregation models, currency hedging, and liquidity support mechanisms, with a focus on what has worked in practice and what can be scaled. 

The discussion builds on UNDP's growing portfolio of investment-ready projects developed through two complementary programmes based at the UNDP Rome Centre in Rome. Energy for Growth in Africa (E4G), a G7-endorsed initiative implemented by UNDP with funding from Italy's Ministry of Environment and Energy Security, currently operates across 10 African countries, supporting the origination, development, and de-risking of clean energy projects in partnership with governments, DFIs, and the private sector. PISTA (Platform for Investment Support and Technical Assistance) provides upstream, midstream, and downstream technical assistance to make climate and energy projects bankable and ready for investment across more than 50 countries. 

Together, E4G and PISTA represent UNDP's core offer for closing Africa's energy investment gap, at a moment when the continent needs more than $190 billion in annual electricity investment by 2030 to meet its development goals. UNDP's participation at AEF 2026 reflects its growing role not only as a project preparation partner, but as a connector between investment-ready pipelines and the capital needed to bring them to life.

About UNDP Rome Centre for Climate Action and Energy Transition 

The UNDP Rome Centre is the principal integrated global platform for the strategic partnership between the Government of Italy and UNDP. Operating within UNDP's Bureau for Policy and Programme Support, the Centre works across 68 countries to mobilise climate finance, develop bankable project pipelines, and support governments in accelerating their energy transitions. 

Learn more at  undp.org/romecentre. 

For media enquiries: omer.kavuk@undp.org