00:07I'm honored to welcome the General Secretary of a committee that gathers not one country but 15,
00:14the West African Committee. Hi and welcome. Good morning. Your committee has been inaugurated in
00:222020. What are your main goals? I know our committee, the National Committee of West Africa was created
00:33by the West African Power Pool, our organization, which itself was created by the head of state of
00:40the ECOWAS, Economic Community of West Africa. And the goal, our goal was to really, our aim was,
00:50is to tackle, to solve the energy problems of our region. You know, the West Africa region we have
00:58now. We are undergoing electricity problems since many years and electrification rate of the region
01:09is very low and also service of electricity is very poor, a lot of load shedding. And the West African
01:19Power Pool has been settled by the head of state to tackle this problem. And tackling this problem,
01:25we need really to, apart from the investment, we need to have quality human resources, qualified human
01:35resources. And we think by joining the CIGRI, so we will have access to the huge knowledge and huge library
01:47of CIGRI and give this access to our people, the staff of utilities, members of WAP, but also to the
01:58students of the region, to the universities of the region, so to increase our knowledge in the
02:06electricity sector, so to strengthen our capacity in solving these problems. This is why we join the CIGRI.
02:13West Africa counts around 400 million of people. You mentioned the disparity of electrical distribution.
02:21How? So what is the rate of electrical?
02:24Yeah, the rate of electrification now is about 50-52%. And very, the distribution of this rate is very, I
02:37mean, very poor. Some countries have less than 30%, some others have more than 80%. So it is not equally
02:49distributed. But generally, I mean, the general rate, access rate,
02:54electricity is very poor. You already have interconnected the continental countries. Tell us more about it.
03:02Yes. Really, one point of the reason is also that some countries have a huge source of electricity, but don't
03:10have money to leverage this source of electricity. And other country doesn't have this source. So we want to connect,
03:20to electrically connect all the countries, set electricity
03:24in the country. So that to make electricity flow from the countries that have the means, to those who don't
03:31have commercial, it will be based on market, I mean, commercial trade. So by doing so, we need interconnection.
03:41Yes. And we started interconnecting the countries many years ago. We are going to finish this interconnection. And indeed, among
03:51the countries, the 14 inland countries, only one is remaining. This is Guinea-Bissau.
03:57And the work ongoing should be finished by the end of this year. So by the end of this year,
04:04we will have 14 countries fully interconnected so that we can trade fully within the region.
04:12Regarding your challenges, your objectives, how Paris session can be a game changer for you, an accelerator for you?
04:19Yeah.
04:20Yeah. This session, as we started going through it, we can see that our people can come here and have
04:30the knowledge of SIGRI, participate in the technical committee, technical group.
04:36And also, we intend to organize meetings in our region. In this meeting, we will have to address our own
04:46problem, which may really be very different from the problem of France, for instance, or even Germany.
04:54Of course.
04:54But we have problems that may solve some of our issues. So we want to take stock of this session,
05:01having contact with SIGRI people and then organize meetings in our region.
05:06Thank you, Mr. Aki. Thank you for coming by.
05:09You are welcome, Madam.
