The Nigerian Model Leading Africa Towards Universal Energy Access

Recently, African leaders, international partners, philanthropic organisations, and private sector stakeholders converged on Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, for a two-day Mission 300 Africa Energy summit. It was a landmark effort to tackle Africa’s energy access challenges and promote sustainable development for Africa’s transition to clean energy.

The Summit was co-sponsored by the African Development Bank and the World Bank. It was hosted by the government of Tanzania, a country that has recorded significant progress in scaling up access to clean electricity and is fast becoming a model for the rest of Africa in the demonstration of new strategies for electrification supply to its people.

The high-level global energy meeting provided a platform for consolidating commitments and announcing new partnerships to advancing the achievement of the 2030 electricity connectivity goal for Africa.

The meeting under the Africa rescue mission identified five key areas to accelerate the realisation of its objectives, including universal energy access, renewable energy dominance, energy efficiency, regional integration, and climate change mitigation measures.

With the target of advancing Mission 300, the summit aimed to deliver electricity to 300 million Africans by 2030. This will also create opportunities for collective efforts for heads of state and government to accelerate energy access across Africa needed to power the future of the continent.

Across African countries, the energy sector solely relies on traditional resources like coal, hydro-power, natural gas, and oil. These make up nearly 80% of the total electricity production.

While nations in Northern and Southern Africa have made progress in tackling energy generation and sustainability issues, challenges remain in Central Africa and the Sahel regions.

The eleven participating nations, which included Chad, Ivory Coast, DR Congo, Madagascar, Malawi Liberia, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Mauritania and Zambia provided detailed energy compacts that set targets for their nations to scale up electricity access and increase renewable energy usage to attract investments.

The AfDB New Deal for Energy in 2016 infused significant progress in expanding access to electricity. It also provided a significant increase from 39% in 2015 to 52% in 2024 across Africa.

Despite this progress, Africa still has over 571 million people without electricity, which the Mission 300 Africa Energy Summit seeks to address.

Tackling Africa’s deficit in electricity requires bold reforms, investments, and enabling environment for sustainable, scalable and affordable energy solutions.

Efforts towards achieving this objective birthed the Dar es Salaam Energy Declaration: a landmark commitment to expand reliable, affordable, and sustainable electricity access across Africa.

Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan highlighted her country’s success story in energy solution and generation strategy. She also expressed her commitment to deliver to the citizens power and clean cooking solutions that would transform lives and economies in line with the energy compact strategy.

The declaration, signed by Nigeria’s President, Bola Ahmed Tinubu and twenty-nine other African Heads of State and Government represents a major step towards closing Africa’s energy gap.

The 30-nation signatories to the Dar-es- Salaam Energy Declaration plan to achieve their goals through National Energy Compacts. This would identify specific policy measures to address constraints across their energy sectors and set targets based on their unique contexts and with financing windows by the AfDB, the World Bank, and other financial institutions.

This also falls in line with the goal of the Nigerian Electricity Act 2024 which sets aside five percent of the annual operating expenditure of power generating companies from the preceding year for the development of their host communities to accelerate the increased generation of electricity for the underserved population in Nigeria.

Leading Africa in achieving this goal, Nigeria unveiled a $23.2 billion investment target in its National Energy Compact plan. The country currently prioritizes the mobilization of $15.5 billion in private sector investment to drive last-mile electrification across the country.

Through this programme, the Nigerian government would increase electricity access from four per cent to nine percent annually. This is geared towards closing the energy gap and boost access to clean cooking solutions from 22 percent to 25 percent annually.

Nigeria also targets expansion of renewable energy’s share in the power generation mix from 22 percent to 50 percent through private investment to drive last-mile electrification in line with UN Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG7), on universal access to modern energy services.

By implementing the action plan in the National Energy Compact, Nigeria is positioning itself as a leader in Africa’s energy transition and creating opportunities for economic growth, job creation, and industrialization.

As the Mission 300 initiative gains momentum, Nigeria’s strong commitment to energy sector reforms, infrastructure expansion, and investment mobilization will be crucial in shaping the future of electricity access across the continent.

Recognising that achieving universal energy access demands collective action, the government has called on development partners, philanthropists and the private sector to join the transformative journey.

Already, the Africa energy summit has attracted about $50 billion commitments from the AfDB, World Bank and other regional financial bodies like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), Islamic Development Bank (IDB), OPEC Fund, and AFD of France, etc.

It is expected that the African nations’ National Energy Compacts would attract minimal conditions to allow the eleven benefiting nations to access the fund towards realising the key objectives of the Mission Africa Energy 300 of providing electricity to 250 million people in the targeted African nations by 2030.