SPECIAL REPORTS AND PROJECTS
Solar energy capacity to reach 200MW next year
Published
2 years agoon

Kampala, Uganda. Xsabo Group says they plan to build another three projects, which will bring the number to five plants with a total installed capacity of 150 MW, worth a total investment of 735 Billion Shillings.
The company received funding for the Mubende project worth 63 Billion Shillings from the Uganda Development Bank and the DFCU Bank.
Uganda will have a total installed capacity of 2000MW when the delayed opening of the Karuma hydropower project happens this year. It was due for commissioning last year by the constrictors, but Synohydro of China asked for an extension of the date saying the works were at 98% completion.
The government embarked on a more complex energy mix to improve stability of supply, involving Hydro, geothermal, thermal, solar and wind energy.
Solar, one of the cleanest renewable sources is also considered the cheapest to maintain.
However, according to Julius Wandera, the head of corporate affairs at the Electricity Regulatory Authority, solar energy is also unreliable as a major source because Uganda’s weather is unpredictable.
When you are expecting a plant to give you 8 megawatts, a cloud comes and covers it, and you end up with no or less power,” he says. But he maintains that it is important to supplement the more reliable sources like thermal and hydro, despite the latter being more expensive.
According to studies at the Ministry of Energy, Uganda on average has enough sunshine to produce 5.1-kilowatt house per square meter.
Electricity demand is increasing at a rate of 8.2% annually, which translates to 125,000 new customers every year. Currently, four large solar power plants sell power to the national grid.
These include the Bufulubi in Mayuge District, the Tororo Plant and the Soroti plant, all 10MW each, as well as the largest one, the 20MW Kabulasoke solar energy plant in Mpigi district, also owned by Xsabo Group.
A 50 MW Namugoga Solar Power Station, in Wakiso District, planned for constriction by Solar Energy for Africa and Naanovo Energy Inc will be the largest yet if finished later this year. Small solar applications are often used in rural electrification projects such as Solar Home Systems or solar water heating.
The small off-grid systems come in handy because of some sparsely populated areas in Uganda where it would be less cost-effective to extend grid lines, according to the strategy.
For that, the government estimates that over 30% of the population is unlikely to be reached for the next several decades unless more investments are pout in small off-grid home systems. According to the Uganda Solar Energy Association, over 30,000 solar or photovoltaic (PV) systems have already been installed in homes in rural areas.
The 10-year Rural Electrification Strategy ending 2022 indicates that off-grid connections are supposed to have grown by 135,500 connections, with 95% of them being solar. The off-grid connection numbers are supported by the growing number of supply and distribution companies that offer products on credit or hire-purchase, where a customer pays for as low as 500 Shillings per day.
In 2013, the government awarded a contract to Ergon Solair, a Taiwanese-US venture to build a 500MW solar plant divided into two four parks of 125MW each. It was supposed to be completed by 2016. It would be the largest solar plant in Africa and the world alongside the 500MW Noor Solar Complex in the Agadir district of Morocco.
In February, the China Energy Engineering Corporation (CEEC) announced plans to build a 500MW solar power plant in Uganda in two phases. The Electricity Regulatory Authority-ERA said they had not received any notification of that kind from the Chinese company.
Xsabo is also implementing another project dubbed the Xsabo Lira Power Station or Xsabo Lira Solarline, a US$45 million, with a capacity to generate 50 MW. This is a public-private partnership between Xsabo and Lira District Administration and is also expected to be completed by December 2022, completing a total investment by Xsabo of about 200 Million United States Dollars.
Original Source: URN via independent.co.ug
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SPECIAL REPORTS AND PROJECTS
Will more sovereign wealth funds mean less food sovereignty?
Published
2 months agoon
April 13, 2023
- 45% of Louis Dreyfus Company, with its massive land holdings in Latin America, growing sugarcane, citrus, rice and coffee;
- a majority stake in Unifrutti, with 15,000 ha of fruit farms in Chile, Ecuador, Argentina, Philippines, Spain, Italy and South Africa; and
- Al Dahra, a large agribusiness conglomerate controlling and cultivating 118,315 ha of farmland in Romania, Spain, Serbia, Morocco, Egypt, Namibia and the US.
Sovereign wealth funds invested in farmland/food/agriculture (2023)
|
|||
Country
|
Fund
|
Est.
|
AUM (US$bn)
|
China
|
CIC
|
2007
|
1351
|
Norway
|
NBIM
|
1997
|
1145
|
UAE – Abu Dhabi
|
ADIA
|
1967
|
993
|
Kuwait
|
KIA
|
1953
|
769
|
Saudi Arabia
|
PIF
|
1971
|
620
|
China
|
NSSF
|
2000
|
474
|
Qatar
|
QIA
|
2005
|
450
|
UAE – Dubai
|
ICD
|
2006
|
300
|
Singapore
|
Temasek
|
1974
|
298
|
UAE – Abu Dhabi
|
Mubadala
|
2002
|
284
|
UAE – Abu Dhabi
|
ADQ
|
2018
|
157
|
Australia
|
Future Fund
|
2006
|
157
|
Iran
|
NDFI
|
2011
|
139
|
UAE
|
EIA
|
2007
|
91
|
USA – AK
|
Alaska PFC
|
1976
|
73
|
Australia – QLD
|
QIC
|
1991
|
67
|
USA – TX
|
UTIMCO
|
1876
|
64
|
USA – TX
|
Texas PSF
|
1854
|
56
|
Brunei
|
BIA
|
1983
|
55
|
France
|
Bpifrance
|
2008
|
50
|
UAE – Dubai
|
Dubai World
|
2005
|
42
|
Oman
|
OIA
|
2020
|
42
|
USA – NM
|
New Mexico SIC
|
1958
|
37
|
Malaysia
|
Khazanah
|
1993
|
31
|
Russia
|
RDIF
|
2011
|
28
|
Turkey
|
TVF
|
2017
|
22
|
Bahrain
|
Mumtalakat
|
2006
|
19
|
Ireland
|
ISIF
|
2014
|
16
|
Canada – SK
|
SK CIC
|
1947
|
16
|
Italy
|
CDP Equity
|
2011
|
13
|
China
|
CADF
|
2007
|
10
|
Indonesia
|
INA
|
2020
|
6
|
India
|
NIIF
|
2015
|
4
|
Spain
|
COFIDES
|
1988
|
4
|
Nigeria
|
NSIA
|
2011
|
3
|
Angola
|
FSDEA
|
2012
|
3
|
Egypt
|
TSFE
|
2018
|
2
|
Vietnam
|
SCIC
|
2006
|
2
|
Gabon
|
FGIS
|
2012
|
2
|
Morocco
|
Ithmar Capital
|
2011
|
2
|
Palestine
|
PIF
|
2003
|
1
|
Bolivia
|
FINPRO
|
2015
|
0,4
|
AUM (assets under management) figures from Global SWF, January 2023
|
|||
Engagement in food/farmland/agriculture assessed by GRAIN
|
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SPECIAL REPORTS AND PROJECTS
Farmland values hit record highs, pricing out farmers
Published
7 months agoon
November 21, 2022
SPECIAL REPORTS AND PROJECTS
Ugandan communities battle to benefit from mining on their land
Published
9 months agoon
August 26, 2022
Communities in Karamoja face an uphill task organising to beat international capital and authoritarian politics.
Rupa, Uganda – A handful of artisanal miners stand shirtless in an open pit, breaking boulders that glint white in the sun. Nearby, soldiers stand sullenly at the gate of the Sunbelt Marble Mine and Factory, owned by Chinese businessmen who have sunk $13m into the project.
These are the two faces of the mining rush in the Karamoja region of northeast Uganda: small-scale freelance miners, toiling with basic equipment for scant reward, and a mix of wealthy foreign and local investors protected by the state.
Here in Rupa, a sub-county of Moroto district, the locals have seen companies come and go, buying up land and dividing communities. So in 2017, when they got wind that a Chinese company was coming, they were determined to do things differently: this time, they were going to organise.
It was a pioneering attempt to ensure that local people benefitted from mining, building on customary ownership and exploiting little-used provisions of Ugandan land law.
But the story of how it worked – and how it did not – shows just how hard it is for communities to organise in the face of international capital and authoritarian politics.
Mining rush
Many of the 1.2 million people in Karamoja are cattle-keepers, driving their herds across grasslands managed by clan and custom. The rains are fickle, so negotiating access to pasture involves an element of give-and-take.
But the mining companies that are exploring the region want something solid and immovable: the minerals that lie beneath the soil, including marble, limestone, copper and gold.
In the early 2000s, the army forcefully disarmed the gun-wielding cattle-raiders who once roamed the plains, and speculators rushed in during the ensuing peace.
“The first businesspeople who came were taking over the land,” says Simon Nangiro, chairman of the Karamoja Miners Association, which represents small-scale miners in the region. “Companies come with military accompaniments … [They’re] negotiating behind the scenes with people who are vulnerable.”
According to the mining cadastre, the government has granted full mining leases in Karamoja to four companies – Sunbelt, Tororo Cement, DAO Marble and Mechanized Agro – across 79 square km (31 square miles) of land.
It has also issued licences for exploration to dozens of other local and foreign companies on roughly 4,000 square km (1,544 square miles) and is considering applications on nearly 5,000 square km (1,931 square miles) more.
Documents like leases, licences and land titles are how the modern state speaks – but it is a language foreign to Karamoja, where ownership is rarely written down and only a quarter of people can read.
“Here in Karamoja we have a customary land tenure system,” explains John Bosco Logwee, an elder in Rupa and one of the leaders of organising efforts there. “As a result, people [from outside] looked at the land and thought it does not belong to anybody.”
In Uganda as a whole, an estimated 80 percent of the land is held customarily although exact figures are hard to come by. The problem of proving who owns what worries everyone from activists, who warn of land grabs, to the World Bank, which wants to spur rural property markets.
Under the 1998 Land Act, communities can create “communal land associations” (CLAs) to defend their collective land rights. More than 600 have been incorporated nationwide, often with World Bank support.
Some of the first to be established were in Karamoja, where 52 were set up in 2012-2013 by a non-governmental organisation, the Uganda Land Alliance. According to Edmond Owor, its former executive director, the CLAs had some early successes in fending off fraudulent investors. But in 2016, the Alliance itself collapsed due to internal governance problems, leaving the fledgling CLAs on their own.
“The creation of a CLA is a very easy process, and that’s where the easy work ends,” says Simon Longoli, executive director of the Karamoja Development Forum (KDF), a civil society group based in Moroto. “We find it very difficult to trust a piece of paper to ensure the rights of the community over a piece of land.”
What people really needed, he thought, was organising and capacity building to assert the rights they had on paper. In short, they needed power.

Community organising
Communities in Rupa had been at the forefront of Karamoja’s mining rush. A 2014 report by Human Rights Watch described how two foreign-owned companies had come to the area and started exploration without the consent of the locals.
“International capital has come into Karamoja, it has allied itself with powerful political and military elites at the centre, facilitated by influence peddlers,” says David Pulkol, a Rupa indigene who formerly served as a member of parliament, government minister and head of Uganda’s external intelligence agency. “Those three are in the same bed, dispossessing the ordinary people of their livelihoods.”
So in 2017, the three clans of Rupa sub-county joined their CLAs together to form the Rupa Community Development Trust (RUCODET), taking out the formal title to the land on behalf of 35,000 people.
Longoli and his KDF colleagues arranged training for the trust’s leaders in negotiation and other skills. No other community in Karamoja had organised on such a scale to take on mining companies.
The arrival of the Sunbelt mine would give RUCODET its first major test. Under Ugandan law, all minerals belong to the government. But landowners have “surface rights” to the land itself, which have often been trampled by mining companies.
Now, thanks to RUCODET, the Chinese investors would have to negotiate with the community. “It was tough,” says Logwee, the elder. “We had no experience before of that kind of thing.”
Sunbelt had strong backing from Operation Wealth Creation, a sprawling Ugandan military programme that started out giving seeds to farmers and was now helping build fruit factories, disburse credit and develop the minerals sector.
The programme is led by Salim Saleh, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s ubiquitous brother, whom many consider the second-most powerful man in the country. He is a feared general with extensive business interests, who has been accused by UN experts of grabbing resources during the 1998-2003 Congo war – an allegation he has always denied.
As part of the negotiations, a team from RUCODET travelled 400km to Kapeeka, where a Chinese-owned industrial park has been constructed close to Saleh’s personal residence. Longoli of KDF says that some leaders in RUCODET and in local government were taking calls from Saleh himself to get an agreement signed.
Major Kiconco Tabaro, a spokesman for Operation Wealth Creation, claims that it was not directly involved in the negotiations but has “a strategic working relationship with all ministries, departments and agencies of government” to “help bring about socioeconomic transformation”.
It was hard to say no to a man like Saleh, and the leaders of RUCODET did not. In 2018, they signed away surface rights to 3.3 square km of land to Sunbelt for 21 years, receiving compensation of 1.8 billion shillings ($500,000), they say.
By one yardstick, that was a lot of money. Small-scale miners in Rupa say they get just 100,000 shillings ($28) from traders for filling a 7-tonne truck with stone, a task which takes four people at least a week.
But Sunbelt expects gross revenues of $30m a year, according to the 2021 manifesto of the ruling National Resistance Movement – making the payout to RUCODET equivalent to one week’s turnover. A spokesman for Sunbelt declined an interview request for this story.
The leaders of RUCODET used 100 million shillings ($28,000) to set up 94 educational scholarships for schoolchildren and university students. Some of the rest was handed out as cash to community members.
But there was protest from those who felt left out and mutterings that money was misused or even stolen – allegations which Logwee dismisses as “speculation”. Three people familiar with the matter told Al Jazeera that the lawyer who advised RUCODET charged 400 million shillings ($110,000) for his services, which included the cost of surveying and titling the land.
Then tragedy struck. The leader of RUCODET was a man called Marjory Dan Apollo Loyomo, a brother of the former spy chief Pulkol. “He was very strong, he was very charismatic, he was very committed,” recalls Longoli. He was also the elected chairman of Rupa sub-county, which meant he had to represent his people in disputes.
In 2019, after a decade of peace, the armed cattle-raiders started to make a comeback. Loyomo had disagreed with aspects of the army’s handling of the issue.
On December 17 that year, according to the UN Human Rights office, the army called him to a military detach in Rupa. It had impounded cattle after a raid; local people were angry. Loyomo, as sub-county chairman, tried to deliberate with the officers. A soldier shot him dead.
The regional army commander was transferred soon afterwards. His successor, Brigadier General Joseph Balikudembe, says that he cannot comment on the incident due to ongoing proceedings against the soldiers involved.
Nobody that Al Jazeera spoke to wanted to speculate on the reasons for Loyomo’s killing, but everyone agreed that it was a devastating setback.
“The loss of a torchbearer, the founder chairman, has been a very big loss for RUCODET,” says Logwee, who has succeeded him to the role.
“He was fighting really for his people,” argues Joyce Nayor, an activist and Rupa resident who is critical of the trust’s current leadership. “Since he died, RUCODET has also died a natural death.”
Hardly any local people got jobs in the Sunbelt mine, Al Jazeera heard on two visits to the area with local activists. Some small-scale miners have been allowed to remain in a corner of the land that was allocated to the company, where they break boulders for sale.
They complain that Sunbelt tried to push them into an ever-smaller area and take away the traders who would buy their stone – and that RUCODET has done little to help.
“RUCODET is there in name only,” says Isaiah Aleu, a miner.

Choppy waters
Land trusts and CLAs are promising tools for communities to defend their rights, say land campaigners. But there is no consensus about how they should navigate turbulent political waters.
Pulkol is now helping build RUCODET’s capacity through the Africa Leadership Institute, a non-governmental organisation he leads. He thinks the best hope for Karamoja is to work with investors and government for shared benefits, rather than to block them altogether.
Longoli, the activist, is not so sure. Often when it comes to minerals, “the best deal is just no deal”, he says. “RUCODET, because of pressure from above or pressure from within the institution, was in a hurry to close deals.”
Yet he remains hopeful that organisations like RUCODET can be the basis for something better. “These are not perfect but they give a bridge somewhere,” he says.
The next test is coming soon.
In Loyoro sub-county of Kaabong district, 100km (62 miles) to the north, a new company called Moroto Ateker Cement is exploring for limestone. Pulkol, representing the local government of Moroto, sits on its board.
The state-owned Uganda Development Corporation has a 45 percent stake in the project. The seven clans of Loyoro have started the process of forming a trust, after the RUCODET model.
Meanwhile, in the bush, surrounded by soldiers and tsetse flies, exploratory drilling machines bore down into their land.
Source: Al Jazeera
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