WWEA welcomes introduction of GET FiT in Uganda

WWEA President He Dexin: “WWEA congratulates the involved governments and international organisations for such a milestone. Developing countries not only in Africa need urgently the support to introduce renewable energy on a large scale, and the GET FiT Uganda programme is an excellent step to achieve this target.”

 

WWEA Secretary General Stefan Gsänger: “Around a decade ago, WWEA has started pushing for bilateral and multilateral feed-in tariff programmes for developing countries. We highly welcome that now such a programme will be implemented. We encourage further governments to implement such programmes as part of their development aid programmes. We urgently need a Global Feed-in Tariff Programme which should be an integral part of the Green Climate Fund.”

 

The GET FiT Uganda programme was launched in Kampala on 31 May 2013. The programme has been jointly developed by the Government of Uganda, the Electricity Regulatory Agency (ERA), KfW and Deutsche Bank. Moreover, it is being supported by the Government of Norway, the United Kingdom, the Government of Germany and the World Bank. The programme is excepted to leverage more than EUR 300 million of private capital in renewable energies in Uganda to meet the growing energy demand in the country in an environmentally-friendly and economically viable way.

 

The initial concept of supporting national feed-in legislation with international funds has been originally presented by WWEA ten years ago, and later by WWEA together with its REN Alliance partners, e.g. during the UN Climate Change Conference COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009 and in a position paper on the Green Climate Fund in 2011.

 

A Global Feed-in Tariff programme could not only provide electricity to millions who are currently lacking access to modern electricity services and boost a multi-billion investment programme in new technologies. It could also be a basic component in the word community’s efforts for effective climate change mitigation and hence the Green Climate Fund should open a special facility for GET FiT.