Revisiting Anohu’s Financial Pathways for Decarbonisation in Global Growth Markets, Frontier Economies
Financing fossil fuel transition requires thinking out of the box as charted by Chinelo Anohu, writes Oluchi Chibuzor
The London Climate Action Week 2026 had since come and gone several weeks now, but its significance continues to reecho. With over 100,000 participants drawn form over 100 nations and 25 governments across six continents, plus 1,300 events and 30 flagship events, it is no longer news that it lived up to its billing as a platform for the UN Global Climate Action Agenda.
The discussion, “Beyond the Fossil Fuel Chokepoint: Financial Pathways for Decarbonisation,” anchored by the Oxford House and the University of Oxford Climate Alumni Network, (OxCAN) took the conversation to a new level. However, after all said and done, energy transition costs good money. And unless this money matter is gotten right, the conversations around climate action would remain a sheer grammar warehousing.
This is why the keynote address, “Financial Pathways for Decarbonisation in Global Growth Markets and Frontier Economies,” presented by the Founder/CEO of Mutandis Africa, Chinelo Anohu, remains a subject for discussions in the relevant circles weeks after the London event.
The former head of the African Development Bank’s Africa Investment Forum (AIF) began a deep dive into the subject: “The question is no longer whether the world must transition away from fossil fuels. The harder question is whether the world can finance the transition in a manner that is orderly, equitable, investable, and politically durable,” she began.
The challenge, she said, is not simply technical. It is institutional. It is financial. It is political. And above all, it is moral.
Anohu explained that there is no paucity of funds to actualise the energy transition targets, as “the world is awash with capital: pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, insurance pools, infrastructure funds, development finance institutions, climate funds, etc.”
The problem, instead, is paucity of bankable instruments, credible project structures, and investable pathways. Funds hardly get to where they are needed most, not because the need is unclear or the opportunity is absent, but “because capital does not move on need alone.”
“It moves on structure. It moves where risk is intelligible. It moves where projects are prepared. It moves where cash flows are credible. It moves where regulation is stable. It moves where public institutions and private capital can trust the rules of engagement. This is the central financing challenge for decarbonisation in global growth markets and frontier economies.
“Too often, climate finance debates are trapped in the arithmetic of pledges. We ask how many billions have been promised, how many billions have been disbursed, and how many billions remain outstanding. Those questions are important. But they are insufficient.
“The more important question is this: how many projects are truly bankable? How many grid projects are ready for institutional capital? How many renewable energy platforms have viable offtake arrangements? How many critical mineral projects are structured to capture value locally rather than export dependency? How many transition projects can absorb patient capital without transferring all risk to the public purse? If we cannot answer those questions, we will continue to have declarations without deployment,” she declared.
Framing is essential
Meanwhile, in Anohu’s view, the fossil fuel economy is not simply an energy system, as sometimes mistaken. It is a fiscal system. It is a revenue system. It is an employment system. It is an infrastructure system. And in many countries, it is also a political settlement. This is especially true in frontier economies and resource dependent states. For instance, fossil fuel revenues funds social services and infrastructure for some countries. Thus, phasing down fossil fuels without addressing revenue substitution is to ignore the state itself.
“A transition that treats Africa and other frontier markets only as sites of extraction, rather than as partners in industrial transformation, will reproduce the very inequalities the climate agenda claims to overcome. This is where the concerns of the Global North and Global South must be brought into honest conversation. But the task before us is not to choose one set of concerns over the other. It is to design a financial architecture capable of reconciling them,” she stated.
Way Forward
However, the London Climate Action Week is not just about discussing problems, but more importantly, about proffering solutions. The world, according to Anohu, has spent so much time discussing capital availability, but too little time funding the pre-investment architecture that makes capital deployment possible. She, therefore, proffered five financial pathways for decarbonisation in global growth markets.
“For frontier economies, strong project preparation facilities are as important as the capital itself. A poorly prepared project cannot be rescued by good intentions. But a well-prepared project can mobilise capital far beyond the initial public contribution,” she explained.
Second, instruments that match the risk profile of transition assets needs to be built, as they do not all carry similar risk.
“Renewable energy, grid infrastructure, battery storage, clean cooking, energy efficiency, critical minerals processing, and industrial decarbonisation do not all carry the same risks. They require different instruments. Some need concessional first loss capital. Some need guarantees. Some need local currency financing. Some need political risk insurance. Some need revenue stabilisation mechanisms. Some need blended finance. Some need regulatory reform before finance will move at all.
“The problem is not that investors do not understand climate. The problem is that too many transition projects are offered to markets in forms that do not correspond to institutional mandates. Pension funds require long-dated, stable, risk adjusted returns. Banks require repayment certainty. Private equity requires exits. Sovereign investors require strategic alignment. Development finance institutions require impact and additionality,” she explained.
Thirdly, discipline in the mobiliasation of domestic institutional capital is equally vital. Anohu described pension capital as one of the most important pools of long-term savings in any economy, yet there are good reasons for caution and protection.
“But protection should not mean permanent retreat from productive investment. The solution is not to compel pension funds into unsuitable projects,” she stated.
Fourth, Africa and other frontier economies must move from extraction to value creation. The danger, according to Anohu, is that the green transition reproduces the extractive logic of the fossil fuel age: raw materials leave, value is added elsewhere, jobs are created elsewhere, technology is owned elsewhere, and producing countries are left with environmental liabilities.
Lastly, energy efficiency, she said, must be treated as a major financial pathway. And it means different things to different sectors.
“For businesses, efficiency is often the fastest route to lower emissions and stronger margins. For households, it reduces the cost of living. For governments, it reduces import bills and infrastructure pressure. Energy efficiency should therefore be financed as a serious investment class,” she stated.
However, this requires a new compact between public and private finance, Global North and Global South, climate ambition and development necessity, and a compact between urgency and fairness. But these compacts mean different things to different players: the Global North, the Global South, multilateral development banks, private investors, philanthropies and catalytic funders. And taking everything into account and striking a balance are important.
“And for all of us, it means rejecting the false comfort of slogans – just transition, blended finance, energy security, net zero. These phrases matter only if they are translated into balance sheets, contracts, institutions, and livelihoods,” Anohu maintained.
Meanwhile, she was clear that the next phase of climate action would be judged less by announcements than by execution. All talks and no action makes energy transition a circus of talk shows.
“The world does not lack communiqués. It lacks bankable pipelines. It lacks transition instruments designed for the real risk profile of frontier economies. It lacks sufficient local currency finance. It lacks enough regional aggregation. It lacks credible revenue replacement strategies for fossil fuel dependent states. It lacks institutional bridges between capital and projects.
“These are solvable problems. But they require a change in mindset. We must stop treating Africa and other growth markets as peripheral to the transition. They are central to it. We must stop treating development as a concession to climate ambition. It is the condition of climate legitimacy.
“We must stop treating private capital as a substitute for public policy. It is a partner that requires rules, signals, and structures. We must stop treating public finance as charity. It is the catalytic engine of a new investment architecture,” Anohu explained.
The Mutandis CEO/Founder, also sees the transition as one of the great development opportunities of the 21st Century is gotten right. It can build grids, expand access, deepen capital markets, create jobs, support industrialisation, reduce import dependence, improve resilience, and give young people in frontier economies a stake in the future rather than a reason to distrust it.
In rounding off, Anohu held that just as the fossil fuel age was built on a particular financial architecture – reserves, concessions, pipelines, shipping routes, insurance markets, offtake contracts, subsidies, and geopolitical protection – the renewable age will also require an architecture. But it will not emerge by accident.
“It must be designed. And if it is designed without fairness, it will be resisted. If it is designed without bankability, it will remain underfunded. If it is designed without frontier economies, it will be incomplete.
“We must finance decarbonisation not as an act of benevolence, but as an act of shared strategic intelligence. We must build instruments worthy of the scale of the transition. We must align capital with justice, and justice with execution. And we must remember that the purpose of finance is not merely to move money. It is to make the future possible,” she concluded amid applauses.
