Johannesburg: AfricUpdate – News Desk
While global energy talks at the final G20 Energy Transitions Working Group (ETWG) and Energy Transitions Ministerial Meetings ended inconclusively, a different, more urgent struggle was won – one affecting a young girl who, instead of studying after school, must trek for firewood. During the meetings this week, South Africa used its G20 Presidency to successfully champion this cause, lifting the overlooked challenge of clean cooking from the shadows into the mainstream of the G20, a legacy Electricity and Energy Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa called a “major victory” for the continent.
The Minister was speaking during a media briefing at the culmination of the final G20 Energy Transitions Working Group (ETWG) and Energy Transitions Ministerial Meetings held in KwaZulu-Natal this week. He noted that across the globe, at least one billion people who are mainly African do not have access to clean cooking – forcing them to cook using health threatening fuels like coal, wood, animal dung and paraffin.
“The major victory is clean cooking. It’s huge for the continent. You and I could take it for granted but as we sit here, there’s a young girl somewhere in a remote village who comes back from school, drops her books and goes to fetch firewood. That’s what we want to change. We know that there’s 1.4 billion people on the continent and one billion of them don’t have access to clean cooking and of that, 600 million don’t have access to electricity. So, I am happy that we were able to find each other to say that we could differ on other things, but this is a human rights issue. Finally, we agreed. So, the legacy of South Africa’s Presidency is to lift clean cooking into the mainstream agenda of the G20 – the most industrialised powerful countries in the world,” he said on Friday.
Although the meetings did not find a consensus on other issues, the Minister said this was to be expected.
“Given the polarity of views in the energy complex, it was always going to be a very difficult ask for us to be able to get to a consensus that then gets to be lifted into a communique that all the parties in the room agree on the formulation. As we expected we got to see those tensions. Sometimes it was a binary discussion with renewables on the one side and fossil fuels on the other side and of course, the middle position of doing all of the above. But what was important was to ensure that we surface those issues and conversations were able to happen and unfold,” he said.
The Minister highlighted that although they could not find consensus on all the priority areas at the G20, South Africa will continue to pursue those on other platforms. “The Ten-Year Infrastructure Investment Plan, it is part of the AU (African Union) 2063 Agenda we will do that. There are some partners here who area already supporting us. On the issues of green hydrogen there was a South Africa-European Union (EU) Summit and the President (Cyril Ramaphosa) and (EU President) Ursula von der Leyen have agreed to a set of packages.
“Although we didn’t find consensus it doesn’t mean the work doesn’t continue. Even though there are some areas where we couldn’t find each other here, we are working together with individual states and the EU. It doesn’t stop that momentum,” Ramokgopa said.
