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Oluchi Chibuzor

Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Mutandis Africa Group, Chinelo Anohu has called for a collaborative, continent-wide mobilisation of African capital to power the global green transition.

She made the remarks during a high-level panel, tagged, “Accelerating Climate Action Through Global Trade,” convened by the University of Oxford Climate Alumni Network (OxCAN), the New York Climate Exchange, and Pace University.

The session, held as part of deliberations during the New York Climate Week, alongside the 80th Session of United Nations General Assembly examined how trade and finance can be harnessed as levers for decarbonization rather than barriers to growth.

Anohu, who previously led the African Development Bank’s flagship investment vehicle – the African Investment Forum and Nigeria’s National Pension Commission (PenCom), challenged the prevailing narrative that Africa must remain a passive recipient of climate finance.

“Africa’s challenge is not an absence of capital, but a dearth of deal structuring and origination capabilities.” she said. “We receive less than 4 percent of global FDI, yet carry some of the world’s highest climate burdens. It behoves on us, therefore, to reimagine ways of ameliorating those burdens. For instance, if we pool African pension, insurance, and sovereign wealth funds, and align them in carefully structured instruments, we can present Africa not as 54 fragmented markets but as one bankable climate finance opportunity. That will be a significant step towards the shift from price-takers to agenda-setters”

On the fraught question of fossil fuels and industrial growth, Anohu was unequivocal in advocating a middle ground. “It would be a profound inequity to ask Africa to ignore available resources to address fundamental issues of industrialisation when the Global North built, and in some cases continues to build, its prosperity on fossil fuels.”

Perhaps most striking was the concrete proposal for a “Pan-African, trade–focused deal development pipeline that fosters sustainability and leverages the continent’s domestic capital in engendering solutions where climate justice presents as a springboard, not a straitjacket” she concluded.

Across the two-hour exchange, one message reverberated: trade is no longer merely about goods and services. “Trade is leverage. Trade is climate policy. Trade is global justice.” Anohu reiterated that justice must begin with Africa, not as an afterthought, but as a principal architect of climate-aligned trade.