From pv magazine 12/24-01/25
Until relatively recently, African solar projects such as the 1.8 GW Benban site in Egypt were in part funded by donor support. This is not a sustainable long term model because of the limited finance available from donor nations. It would be more effective for donors and multilateral organizations to help encourage greater private sector participation through funding PV projects directly, investing in grid development, and encouraging governments to provide attractive investment terms.
Around 600 million of the African continent’s 1.5 billion people are currently without access to electricity at home, a number which means 83% of the world’s electricity-deprived people are in Africa. Africans are being connected to grids and benefiting from residential PV kits, but the number being connected is growing more slowly than the continent’s population. As a result, many continue to rely on firewood or charcoal for lighting and cooking and those with electrical devices must pay to charge them at solar kiosks or rely on friends and family.
Lack of access to electricity is a big brake on economic growth and improvements to living standards so multilateral bodies, donor organizations, and African governments have launched a series of programs aimed at improving the situation. By far the biggest is the Mission 300 plan launched by the World Bank Group and the AfDB in April 2024, which aims to halve the number of Africans without access to electricity to 300 million by 2030.
A combination of the continent’s massive untapped solar resource and falling PV project costs mean that solar power will be key to achieving the Mission 300 goal. There is likely to be increased funding both for solar developers and for ancillary support, such as grid improvements, under the Mission 300 initiative.
Making connections
Under the program, the World Bank has taken responsibility for helping to offer 250 million people access to electricity, and the AfDB 50 million. The organizations acknowledge that massive private sector investment will be crucial to reaching their target, so two World Bank entities – the private-sector-focused International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) – are collaborating to provide better incentives and guarantees for investors in the sector.
World Bank support is being funnelled through a range of initiatives such as the Accelerating Sustainable and Clean Energy Access Transformation Program, covering Southern and Eastern Africa. The World Bank’s International Development Agency (IDA) has committed $5 billion to the program and hopes to leverage another $10 billion in additional investment.
For its part, the AfDB has launched its Desert to Power project with the aim of developing a huge grid powered by 10 GW of solar generation capacity in the 11 countries in the Sahel region of Northern Africa, although specific solar project details are limited. From 2016 to 2022, the AfDB approved funding of $8.3 billion for energy projects, of which 87% were renewables-based and 2.6 GW of clean energy capacity has already been installed.