Towards a New Energy Strategy for Africa

More than 600 million Africans in sub-Saharan Africa cannot access electricity in their homes from a grid.  In order to improve this situation as quickly as possible, the African Development Bank (AfDB) has been working during 2011 on a new energy strategy for Africa with an emphasis on low carbon methods.

• Africa is lagging behind in terms of providing energy access to its people. The challenge is to overcome this problem using low carbon emission development.
• This is where funding is needed.
• A SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the energy sector should inform policy-making. This will help in creating policies with low carbon energy production at the core. Also, the AfDB will come in and make sure that there is leveraging of resources, regional trade and public-private partnerships in an effective manner.
• Public funding is not enough; it can only be used to make way for bigger funding.
• The AfDB needs to be selective and proactive when it comes to project funding.
  • Expansion of advisory services (by the AfDB) is also needed.
  • Co-operation within different departments is needed.
• Since technology has proven to be expensive, African countries should make use of market forces (e.g. China is coming with affordable technology which then drives prices down around the world).
• The focus must also be paid to the transmission of the energy. Most of the time, the transmission networks are not properly developed in these countries.