How can we tackle energy poverty in Africa?

Improving energy access is a critical component in the fight to tackle poverty, as highlighted by the UN's seventh Sustainable Development Goal : Ensuring access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all by 2030. Despite this, millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa lack access to electricity.

This presents a major challenge for the continent, with significant negative consequences for health, education, and economic growth. Tackling energy poverty in Africa is critical for improving quality of life and for promoting economic growth across the continent. Doing so will require a just energy transition that places an emphasis on energy security, availability, and affordability, as well as sustainability.

The scale of energy poverty in Africa

Despite improvements in global energy access, around 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa do not have access to electricity — nearly 80% of the world's total. This limits their access to information and communication and forces them to rely on traditional sources of fuel for cooking and heating, which causes indoor air pollution. It also limits Africa's economic growth: Higher levels of GDP are heavily correlated with electricity use, access, reliability, and affordability, according to the World Bank .

How to tackle energy poverty in Africa

There are many reasons for Africa's poor state of energy access, including a lack of generation capacity, aging power plants, poorly run state-owned utilities and a lack of affordable capital.

Tackling energy poverty in Africa requires addressing these issues and increasing not only electricity access, but supply. Currently, the continent consumes a very small amount of energy per capita: While Africa is home to nearly 17% of the world's population, its share of global electricity generation has remained at around 3% since the early 2000s. London's Heathrow Airport consumes more energy than the entire nation of Sierra Leone.

Exploiting Africa's vast untapped reserves of natural gas is vital to secure constant baseload energy supply to people and industry. Natural gas also underpins the integration of intermittent renewable energy into the grid. Scaling up Africa's renewable energy generation will also improve supply and access. The IEA estimates that it is home to 60% of the best potential solar sites globally. Currently, the continent's entire installed solar capacity is roughly only equivalent to that of Belgium . There are also opportunities for scaling up hydro and wind in many African countries, which can help diversify energy supply and enhance energy security.

The energy transition

Scaling up energy supply and access requires significant public and private sector investment in Africa. The IEA estimates that reaching the target of universal access to electricity will require annual investments of 30 billion USD until 2030 , of which around 20 billion USD would be used in sub-Saharan Africa.

Support from governments, banks and agencies will be vital in ensuring energy access scales effectively on the continent. However, many multilateral financial institutions no longer provide finance for projects related to natural gas or other fossil fuels, even when they address energy poverty. Some renewable projects have recently received financing, such as the African Development Bank's Desert to Power Programme for example. This project aims to provide access to electricity for 250 million people with an electricity interconnection project in the Sahel region.? Power Africa , an international public-private partnership headed by the US government, seeks to establish 60 million new electricity connections.

Africa's energy future can be bright, but stakeholders must consider how to create strategies and policies that leave no one behind.

Article originally published on the IEF website - https://www.ief.org/news/how-can-we-tackle-energy-poverty-in-africa