With intermittent power supply still prevalent, development continues to flicker across Africa.
The World Bank has identified Africa's still unstable power supply as the continent's "largest infrastructure challenge," limiting economic development in the continent's struggling nations.
The report released Nov. 12 - a survey of the state of infrastructure development and its socio-economic impact across the continent - found that Africa still had the weakest infrastructure in the world, slashing business productivity by roughly 40 percent.
Power shortages and interruptions amount to 5 percent in income losses for African enterprises, and up to 1 to 2 percent declines in gross domestic product overall for individual nations.
For African households, such poor power system has come to magnify what has been a global concern for reliable yet sustainable energy sources.
Indeed, while most of the world has been entangled in debates on regulating power consumption, villagers in much of sub-Saharan Africa still worry about when the lights will go back on.
Others may well have yet to even see light from a 5-watt bulb.
By World Bank estimates, 48 sub-Saharan countries produce as much power as Spain. That's 800 million people sharing as much electricity as what Spain generates for its 45 million residents.
With such high demand and poor supply, the electricity bill is heftier in African nations than in other developing countries.
"The underlying causes vary: failures to bring on new capacity to keep pace with demands of economic growth, droughts that reduced hydropower in East Africa, oil price hikes that inhibited affordability of diesel imports for many West African countries, and conflicts that destroyed infrastructure in fragile states," read the World Bank report.
The study estimates that Africa needs some $93 billion in infrastructure spending annually, nearly half of which - or about $40.8 billion - must be dedicated to increasing power generation capacity.
Current spending is roughly a fourth of the ideal, with some $11.6 billion in funds spent on power infrastructure.
This funding gap accounts for almost one-third of the total $31 billion in additional funds the continent needs to catch up with its infrastructure requirements and the entailed maintenance costs.
The World Bank recommends the development of infrastructure capable of producing an additional 7,000 megawatts annually and the establishment of cross-border power trade through laying 22,000 MW of transmission lines in the region.
