World Bank approves financing for DRC’s Inga 3 hydro project

The World Bank approved an initial $250 million in financing for the first phase of the Inga 3 hydropower project in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), with its total funding possibly reaching $1 billion over multiple phases.

The 4,800MW Inga 3 project, projected to cost over $10 billion, is one component of DRC’s 40GW Grand Inga project. The Inga 3 phase would divert about one-sixth of the Congo River’s flow into the Gundi Valley, where a dam on the Bundi River would create a reservoir with a surface area of about 15.5 kilometers square. The land area to be flooded per MW generated would be among the smallest in the world, the World Bank said in 2014.

In July 2017, Factor This reported that the Democratic Republic of Congo announced it expected the date for the $14 billion 4,800MW Inga 3 Basse Chute hydropower project, originally planned to begin generation in 2020 or 2021, would be delayed until 2024 or 2025, according to Kenya-based Group Africa Publishing Ltd.

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“The Bank is returning to top-down mega dams that threaten communities and ecosystems, while sidelining community-driven, decentralized renewable alternatives,” said Josh Klemm, executive director, International Rivers.

The World Bank first approved funding to develop Inga 3 in 2014, but withdrew over governance concerns. The project has since attracted attention from a set of actors aiming to get the project off the ground again.

“We’ve been here before. This approval is a misguided effort by the World Bank to promote hydropower in the DRC after many years and millions of dollars have been spent with nothing to show for it,” said Apollinaire Nsimbi, chairperson of the Board of Directors, and Head of Advocacy for Initiative pour le Développement Local (IDEL). 

The advocacy group International Rivers argues that although the project’s stated goal is to address DRC’s glaring energy deficit, where only about 20% of the population has access to electricity, the World Bank’s plan to develop Inga 3 as a public-private partnership would “incentivize developers to sell the electricity to industrial interests and regional offtakers at the expense of the Congolese public, and risk ballooning the national debt in the likely event of cost overruns and delays.”

“Mega dams are not climate solutions—they are climate liabilities,” said Genny Ngende, Africa Program Senior Campaigner for International Rivers.“It is long past time for the World Bank to promote mega dams like Inga as a silver bullet to address Africa’s energy needs. The future of African energy must be decided by and for its people, not investors and corporations .”

Originally published by Sean Wolfe on Factor This