Kenya leads East Africa in green technologies – World Bank

Kenya is leading the East African region in the implementation of green technologies, a World Bank official said on Tuesday.World Bank Group Director of Innovation Gerardo Corrochano told Xinhua that the region could borrow lessons from the country’s emerging industry.“Kenya is quickly adopting green technologies due to a huge appetite and spirit from entrepreneurs eager to tap into the emerging opportunities,” Corrochano said during a climate conference to launch the Climate Innovation Center (CIC) estimated to cost 12 million U.S. dollars. He added that the World Bank group has partnered with the Danish and British governments to set up the first centre in the region and will be hosted at Strathmore University.The director said that initial estimates indicate that over 5, 000 green jobs will be created by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that will be incubated in the facility. The World Bank official said that commercial banks are yet to embrace extending loans to innovators of green technologies.“Green finance is an emerging ecosystem and so the banks are yet to fully understand the risks in the businesses,” he said, noting that the World Bank is supporting low carbon growth initiatives in Kenya and will be used as a model for the rest of the region.World Bank Climate Technology Program Coordinator Jonathan Coony said that there is a lot of capital in the developed world looking for investment opportunities. “In the last few years, economic growth has been occurring in low income nations but perception of high risk has limited cash inflows,” he said. He noted that under the CIC program, eligible SME’s will receive grants of up to 50,000 U.S. dollars each in order to take their green innovations to the market. “We will provide funds in the early stages of innovations in order to ensure that investors will be more comfortable to buy equity later on,” Coony said. Xinhua