IBM announced at COP27 Egypt’s Environment Without Borders Foundation (EWBF) among the new members of its global pro bono social impact program, the IBM Sustainability Accelerator, after reviewing over 100 global applications and projects. The program applies IBM technologies, such as hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence, and an ecosystem of experts to enhance and scale projects focused on populations vulnerable to environmental threats, including climate change.
IBM previously stated that it intends to select five organizations for this program each year and to provide $30 million in services by the end of 2023. The applicant’s commitment to supporting communities that are especially vulnerable to environmental threats, its ability to increase access to affordable clean energy services, its strategic focus and transparency on measurement and reporting, and other factors were considered during the selection process.
The International Energy Agency reports that the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, disruptions in global supply chains, and diversion of fiscal resources to keep food and fuel prices affordable have slowed progress toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7 of ensuring access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy by 2030.
Environment Without Borders Foundation, a 2015 Egyptian environmental NGO, proposed developing a platform to forecast, track, and communicate clean energy usage options in Egypt. The goal is to enable resilient and sustainable clean energy infrastructure and operations in Egypt, assisting residents of remote villages where energy is currently both expensive and unreliable. The IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite and IBM Cloud will be used to power the clean energy management platform.
“UNDP is delighted to partner with IBM to forecast electricity access that informs better policy and investment decisions, with an initial concentration on African countries. This partnership advances UNDP’s integration mandate and directly contributes to our corporate moonshot to provide 500 million people with access to safe, reliable energy by 2025, focused on reaching the furthest behind first.” said Ahunna Eziakonwa, Assistant Secretary-General, Assitant Administrator and Director of the Regional Bureau for Africa (RBA) at the United Nations Development Programme.
Marwa Abbas, General Manager of IBM Egypt, commented: “The Sustainability Accelerator program represents one of IBM’s environmental, social and governance pillars. We are proud to announce the winners in conjunction with our presence at COP27. IBM will be developing and scaling the winning projects with the help of its innovative solutions and technical expertise to support underpriviladged communities and drive sustainability.” Marwa added: “We are very pleased with this new cohort with Environment Without Borders that will proudly enable us to provide alternative advanced solutions that support the country’s growing interest in achieving sustainable development and gree energy transition.”
“I believe that innovative technological applications can be strongly used for linking green energy users together and this is what we seek in our project,” said Dr. Adel Abdallah Soliman, CEO of Environment Without Borders Foundation. “Our goal is to harness the power of technology to tackle environmental challenges and support vulnerable communities’ livelihood to have a better life,” added Adel.
Also, worth noting that the Egyptian NGO, Environment Without Borders, was selected along with four global institutions: the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) to increase access to sustainable, affordable and reliable energy in African countries, the Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL), building an intelligent model to project energy needs based on current and future human activity, Net Zero Atlantic, to create an interactive digital tool that will geospatially display environmental and socioeconomic impacts of possible energy system futures for Nova Scotia, as well as, the Miyakojima City Government Foundation, to support the development of a renewable energy strategy including a microgrid on Miyakojima island to model electricity demand and advise energy infrastructure development.
