Transition leaders want to ensure spending transparency
The project management unit behind SA’s Just Energy Transition Investment Plan (JET-IP) wants to ensure the public has full access to information about how the billions of rand of grant funding and concessional loans flowing from international partners are spent.
According to the JET-IP, the country will have to mobilise about R1.5-trillion over a fiveyear period to achieve those energy sector transition activities that need to happen for SA to meet its 2030 global climate change commitments.
Through the Just Energy Transition Partnership between SA and international partner countries, more than $11.6bn (R223bn) has already been pledged towards SA transitioning to a lower-carbon energy sector — including creating economic opportunities for workers that will be affected by, for example, the closure of Eskom’s coal-fired power stations.
Of the $11.6bn, about $756m (R14.5bn) has been pledged as grant funding, said Joanne Yawitch, head of the project management unit responsible for implementing the JET-IP.
There had already been much “conversation” about how the grant funding portion would be spent, Yawitch told reporters on Tuesday.
In response to this, the project management unit working with the international partners group developed a “publicly accessible and transparent database of projects that are being financed”, Yawitch said.
For now, this database shows how grant funding has been allocated but will later be expanded to include the concessional loans and commercial financing used to support projects linked to the JET-IP.
“We would like this to be a database that will enable analysis by all stakeholders to see where we are in terms of implementation [of the JET-IP], and it will also be used for monitoring and evaluation,” she said.
More than half of the R14.5bn of grant money that has so far been pledged has already been allocated to specific projects.
Yawitch said they acknowledged that most of the funds were going towards technical assistance and capacity building, and not to “organisations on the ground”.
This was partly because SA had a “weak pipeline” of just energy transition projects.
To address this, the project management unit would also establish a just energy transition funding platform, which was “already in the early stages of being set up”.
This platform is intended to function as a matchmaker between suppliers of grant funding and potential beneficiaries. “We will also provide project preparation support services to project originators such as NGOs, community organisations and trade unions to help them prepare plans and apply for grants,” Yawitch said
“The mechanism that we are setting up is an attempt to ensure that there is a better flow of grant funding to a wider set of beneficiaries, including beneficiaries that have not so far been able to organise ideas that are sufficiently fundable,” she said.
“We want to pay a lot of attention to building this project pipeline and to broaden the base of beneficiaries — particularly I think a priority area would be to support communities in Mpumalanga who are likely to be affected over time as coal mines start to close or as power stations are decommissioned,” Yawitch said.
Mpumalanga will be one of the provinces most affected by the transition. According to the JET-IP, the closure of Eskom coal-fired power stations will directly affect about 90,000 coal workers in the mines and power plants of Mpumalanga where the sector is concentrated.
The platform will serve as another mechanism to provide the public with regular analysis of the deployment of grant funds to just energy transition projects.