Half of Africans don’t have electricity. Can Mission 300 change that?

Around 600 million Africans — roughly half of the continent’s population — still lack access to electricity, a number that has climbed in recent years as population growth outpaces new connections. This has far-reaching consequences: it stifles industrial growth; curtails economic productivity; poses challenges for the provision of health care; and the reliance on dirty fuels is bad for public health. Overall, electricity shortages cost Africa up to 4% of its gross domestic product per year. An ambitious new plan aims to change that: Mission 300, an initiative to provide electricity access to 300 million Africans by 2030. Spearheaded by the World Bank and the African Development Bank, it commits to doubling investments in African power, expanding electricity production, and pushing key policy reforms. This week, the initiative took center stage as representatives from development finance institutions, more than 20 African heads of state, and private sector leaders gathered in Dar es Salaam, the commercial capital of Tanzania, for the first major Mission 300 summit. “The African continent actually has 83% of the 685 million people in the world without access to electricity. Now, that is not the kind of gold medal I think Africa should be getting, right?” AfDB President Akinwumi Adesina told Devex at the conference. What makes Mission 300 different from previous efforts to electrify the continent, proponents say, is its level of focus, wide-ranging partnerships, African leadership, and the sheer scale of investment commitments. The World Bank is putting between $30 billion and $40 billion behind it, while the African Development Bank is adding $18.2 billion. Countries are chipping in for their own electrification efforts, with philanthropies committing additional funding. Mission 300 has already helped 12 million Africans get access to energy in its first year. Mission 300 is “probably the biggest thing that's happening in international development right now,” according to Andrew Herscowitz, the former head of Power Africa, a previous initiative that helped bring new or improved electricity to 200 million people in Africa. He is now CEO of the M300 Accelerator, an effort to accelerate progress toward Mission 300’s goals and that based at the Rockefeller Foundation. At the conference this week, 27 African governments signed onto the Dar es Salaam Energy Declaration, committing to carry out Mission 300’s aims. It will be sent to the African Union for adoption next month. The summit also saw 12 countries unveil their national energy compacts, detailing their plans to electrify their populations, the funding needed, and the reforms they will pursue to achieve their goals. These 12 countries were selected to be part of the first tranche of Mission 300 countries in part because of their significant electricity access deficits: collectively, they represent 52% of the global population without electricity and 25% of those without access to clean cooking. The next tranche of countries will be announced imminently, and pacts for all African countries are expected to be unveiled by the end of this year. Big currents, bigger commitments A long list of philanthropies and development banks have announced their financial commitments to Mission 300. The Rockefeller Foundation joined just days after Mission 300 was announced last spring, also bringing in the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, or GEAPP. Together, they are committing $65 million to the initiative. At the summit, the French development agency pledged another €1 billion, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank said it would put in between $1 billion and $1.5 billion, and the Islamic Development Bank Group pledged $2.65 billion. The OPEC Fund for International Development — the petroleum bloc’s development finance institution — pledged $1 billion toward Mission 300, with the possibility of another $1 billion after a progress review in 2027. In total, the initiative aims to unlock about $90 billion, the amount the banks say is needed to bring electricity to 300 million people across Africa. So where will all this money go? At least 54% will help finance power generation projects, Adesina said. About half of the projects will focus on expanding existing grids, while the rest will be off-grid developments such as solar mini-grids. “There's no brain surgery in getting electricity done. The fact is that the abnormal has become normal. And we need skill, speed, and political action to correct that.” --— Akinwumi Adesina, president, African Development Bank “The off-grid reforms will primarily be renewable, but not the on-grid projects. It will be up to countries to decide how they're using the public financing for which projects. If they've got the natural resources, it's an end-to-end situation,” said Cassady Walters, a managing director for strategy and results with the Rockefeller Foundation’s power and climate team. A key factor, she added, is what types of resources are available and what can be done quickly. Another key piece of the puzzle is regional integration and cross-border power trading. “For the African Development Bank, regional integration is everything. In the last eight, nine years, we've invested more than $44 billion on regional infrastructure,” Adesina said. Power transmission is a natural part of these priorities, he added. The bank is investing in strengthening “power pools” — cross-border electricity exchanges — and regional transmission networks, much like its past support for the transmission line exporting power from Ethiopia to Kenya and its more recent investment in a Mauritania-Mali line. Making it all happen But regional power-sharing isn’t always smooth. During a closed-door session at the summit on the Democratic Republic of Congo’s compact, discussions on the Ruzizi hydropower project — a joint effort with Burundi and Rwanda — were reportedly thrown off course when the Congolese delegation condemned Rwanda for its alleged support of M23 rebels, who have escalated attacks on eastern DRC. Two sources present said the dispute isn’t expected to derail the project, which is close to completion and has buy-in from all three governments. Also important to Mission 300’s success is last-mile connections. The African Development Bank helped expand electricity access in Kenya through a last-mile connectivity project that covered the up-front cost of connecting households to the grid. “Every household would have had to pay $150 to connect, but they didn’t have the money,” Adesina said. Instead, the bank provided funding to the Kenyan government to cover the up-front costs of connecting households, while the consumers could pay back small amounts gradually over many years to the national power company. “You are not self-selecting out of the electricity supply because you can’t afford the initial cost of connection,” he said. Adesina added that AfDB plans to replicate this model in other Mission 300 countries to ensure more households can access electricity without prohibitive upfront costs. Strengthening utilities and pushing through key policy reforms at the country level are also central to Mission 300’s agenda. “One that I'm particularly excited about is in Zambia, where we're putting together a review of their current electricity act. This review will help enable more private sector investment — because one of the reforms they're committing to in their compact is to redo their current electricity act. So this review will help them identify how that new act should be written,” said Walters at Rockefeller. And of course, no electrification push can succeed without serious private investment. Mission 300 is designed to lure in investors by offering blended finance mechanisms, such as guarantees and risk-sharing schemes, to help de-risk projects and unlock capital at scale. The African Guarantee Fund, for example, which AfDB set up in 2011 alongside the Danish and Spanish governments, announced a $5 billion local currency guarantee facility during the summit, with the aim of offering financing to small- and medium-sized enterprises working in distributed renewables. What is inside the compacts? Each country’s national energy compact is built around five pillars that align with Mission 300’s broader goals: expanding energy infrastructure at competitive costs, strengthening regional power integration, scaling up distributed renewable energy and clean cooking solutions, increasing private sector participation, and improving the performance of national utilities. Tanzania’s compact, for example, laid out plans to increase its total power generation capacity by 1,973 megawatts — which would roughly double its installed capacity — including 880 megawatts from hydropower, 463 megawatts from solar, 500 megawatts from wind, and 130 megawatts from geothermal. While the $4.12 billion strategy is largely focused on renewables, it acknowledged that natural gas and liquified natural gas, or LNG, will remain central to Tanzania’s energy strategy, both to reduce reliance on imported fuels and to drive economic growth through exports and import substitution. On the clean cooking front, Tanzania’s compact outlined efforts to nudge consumers towards investing in cleaner cooking technologies, such as electric stoves. These efforts include plans for greater subsidies for households in need and the establishment of standardized labeling for stoves and fuels. The country estimates that reaching 80% access to modern cooking energy by 2034 — a major leap from the current rate of under 10% — will require $1.7 billion in annual investment. To ensure investments are deployed effectively and progress stays on track, Mission 300 is embedding accountability measures, including country-specific monitoring and evaluation mechanisms. It will also continue using the Africa Electricity Regulatory Index, the first edition of which was released in 2018, which assesses the strength of electricity sector regulations and the capacity of regulatory authorities across the continent. Scaling up at speed While the 12 million that Mission 300 has helped in its first year is a significant milestone, maintaining that pace would only reach 60 million people by 2030 — far short of the 300 million target. To stay on track, the pace of electrification must increase fivefold. Chris Chijiutomi, managing director and head of Africa at British International Investment, has spent 25 years working in African energy and said he has never seen anything like this effort. “If I look back on the power space in Africa, this is the first of its kind in galvanizing everybody around the same issue. And then the energy compacts, I think, is an indirect way of putting accountability to all stakeholders,” he said. “For each country, we can see: What’s the gap? What’s the need? What’s the issue? And then what are the projects? And we can make sure that we’re not all chasing the same projects, that we are collectively working together because sometimes we all work in isolation. So that's the excitement for me.” Private sector leaders expressed enthusiasm but also highlighted challenges — particularly around reforms and financial risk. TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné pointed to transmission bottlenecks as a major hurdle. “I was discussing the issue yesterday with the president of Mozambique, where we have a large hydro project. And I told him we cannot start hydro because we don’t see the transmission line behind it,” he said at the summit. There are also lingering concerns about how private companies can effectively manage financial risk in an unpredictable market. Momentum is growing, but achieving Mission 300’s targets will require aggressive, unprecedented action, experts said. The private sector appears willing to engage, and the initiative is largely backed by development finance institutions, philanthropies, and investors — rather than relying on Western aid agencies, which are facing budget cuts. “This is an unprecedented partnership,” Adesina said. “There's no brain surgery in getting electricity done. The fact is that the abnormal has become normal. And we need skill, speed, and political action to correct that.”