Date and Venue: 26 June 2023 (Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Lagos, Nigeria)
bACKGROUND
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 2030, to which Nigeria is a key signatory of aims to ensure human and environmental security through the achievement of 17 goals by 2030. The SDGs are delineated to improve various socio-economic, environmental, and partnership-related indicators, however, local actions are required to attain the people-oriented objectives of reducing poverty and ensuring sustainable economies and environment.
The need for actions at the local level is more urgent because the goals and targets have to be achieved within the prevailing context of rising global demand for water, food, and energy, a growing deficit, and competing uses as a result of urbanization, climate change impacts, global recession, and insecurities among others.
Furthermore, the strain to meet the demand for food, water, and energy without compromising the environment and future human needs, reinforces the importance of Resource recovery and Resource reuse (RRR) approaches as a potential pathway to sustainable economic development. This is because RRR not only allows the recovery of nutrients, water and energy from waste for other productive uses but has the potential to improve a country’s macro-economic indicators, create jobs, access to energy and income generation. For example, it has been estimated that the potential sanitation economy for Nigeria by 2023 is 26.1 billion dollars if the government provides the enabling environment and the private sector the required investments. However, most resource reuse and recovery businesses that aim to recover energy, water, and nutrients are unable to expand and sustain their initiatives.
The key question this activity or study aims to answer by understanding the investment climate is ‘why has the projected scaling up and sustainability not been achievable for a high proportion RRR businesses’?
Relatedly, the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) has developed a framework to assess the investment climate for Circular Bioeconomy, the assessment has been carried out in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Philippines, Cambodia, Ghana, Kenya, Ethiopia, Egypt, Burkina Faso, Rwanda, Peru, and Columbia.
oBJECTIVes
- Sensitize key stakeholders about the activity.
- Identify challenges that RRR businesses face in terms of policy and regulation, business infrastructure, access to finance, business support services and access to markets.
- Identify priority solutions and recommendations to the challenges.
- Identify RRR businesses for site visits.
Expected Outcomes
Information is obtained first-hand from the management staff of the businesses about their experiences in relation to access to finance, infrastructure, support services, access to markets, as well as challenges with and recommendations for enabling policies and regulation.