The African Energy Chamber has held its first meeting with its Local Content Committee, placing local content development at the core of its activities.
With several established markets like Nigeria or Angola and frontier energy markets such as Senegal or Uganda, the oil sector supports Africa’s economic recovery, according to the AEC.
It noted that as a result, the African local content became a key priority for government, regulators and industry stakeholders.
Issues around the perceptions and understanding of local content dynamics were major topics of discussion and key points put forward included the need for African governments and companies to develop a better implementation of local content policies and come up with new approaches putting entrepreneurship and capacity building as priorities.
From financing African starts-ups, small and medium-sized enterprises and companies to promoting an enabling business environment, it was agreed that African governments and regulators need to rise up to the task and provide for better conditions and environments for African entrepreneurs to thrive.
A statement by the AEC explained that established African energy markets such as Congo Brazzaville, Equatorial Guinea or Gabon were still missing a pool of strong local companies across the value-chain, and especially in upstream.
It said further, “Despite producing oil and gas for decades, their environment has remained until now unfavorable to the nurturing of entrepreneurs in oil and gas, especially because of a lack of domestic financing.
“The regionalisation of the African content was identified as a key trend for the short and medium-term. With the roll-out of the African Continental Free Trade Area and the upcoming first oil and gas in many African markets, the potential to have local content move away from a pure international-local perspective is real.”
It stated further that it was an opportunity for local companies within established markets, be it Nigerian companies regionalising the oil and gas content or South African and Kenyan companies regionalising content within the renewable energy space. African companies have the means and opportunities to create regional ventures and partnerships taking the African content development to a new level and must be seizing them.
In that regard, according to the statement, upcoming producers such as Senegal, Mozambique or Uganda have a unique opportunity to innovate as they develop their own approach to capacity building and local content development all of which are essential to Africa’s economic recovery.
