Good morning to you all!

It is a pleasure to be with you for today’s launch of the Coolease Financial Mechanism. I wish to thank our guests from UN Environment and the Basel Agency for Sustainable Energy for travelling to Kigali for this important occasion, and our partners at BDF, BRD, EUCL and the Rwanda Green Fund for being with us.

Today is an important moment in Rwanda’s journey to advance clean cooling, meet our obligations under the Kigali Amendment and play our part to address the climate crisis. We know that successful implementation of the Kigali Amendment will avoid up to half a degree Celsius of warming by the end of the century, and up to a full degree if paired with energy efficiency measures.

Since the launch of the Rwanda Cooling Initiative in March last year with support from the Kigali Cooling Efficiency Programme, the team has been working on a National Cooling Strategy that will see Rwanda move to efficient and clean cooling technologies.

The strategy includes specific policy actions to bring the cooling sector into the 21st century. These include awareness and capacity building, adoption of minimum energy performance standards for cooling technologies, and innovative financial mechanisms among others. Taken together, this plan of action will see Rwanda move quickly to environment friendly cold chain systems.

Changing how cooling works is not just an environmental priority. It’s also imperative for rapid socio-economic transformation. By improving the provision and efficiency of cooling systems, we can also improve hospital vaccine and medication storage and agricultural cold chain facilities. This will have positive benefits for the health of citizens and lead to increased food security and higher incomes for farmers.

In this context, cooling sits at the heart of our efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement. This is one of the reasons Rwanda recently joined the global Cool Coalition led by UN Environment, which seeks to mobilise the political will and private sector investment to transform cooling around the world.