The Africa energy summit is to be hosted by the Government of the United Republic of Tanzania, the African Union, the African Development Bank Group, and the World Bank Group. The Summit is an opportunity for governments, private sector leaders, development partners, and civil society to advance the ambitious goal of providing electricity access to 300 million people by 2030 known as Mission 300 a target announced by the African Development Bank Group and the World Bank Group in April 2024.
In the effort to ensuring electricity access to 300 million people, the world bank group plans to make use of renewable energy systems to connect 250 million people with an approximate $30 billion of public sector investment needed to facilitate that and the African Development Bank Group will support the electricity connection of the additional 50 million people.
The mission 300 aims to accelerate the pace of electrification in Sub-Saharan Africa while ensuring that the transition to more diversified and cleaner sources of energy meets growing demand, brings economic growth, and creates jobs. Efforts are also focused on investing in generation, transmission, distribution, regional interconnection, and sector reform to ensure quality, reliability, and affordability of power supply. The commitments and measures announced during the Summit will help secure political buy-in at the highest level, crowd in private sector financing and additional resources for energy access, and fast-track critical policy measures that are essential to reaching the ambitious goals of Mission 300.
The share of the global population with access to electricity increased from 78% in 2000 to 91% in 2020 and is expected to rise to only 92% by 2030 (WB, 2023). Sub-Saharan Africa has also made progress, with electricity access rising from 25 percent in 2000 to 48 percent in 2020. But still One out of two people in Sub-Saharan Africa lacked access to electricity in 2020, and access in this region would need to more than double by 2030 to meet the SDG of universal Connectivity.
Africa is considered the most energy deficient continent in the world hosting over 75% of theworld’s population without access to electricity. More than 600 million people lack access to electricity on the continent, 98 percent of them located in sub-Saharan Africa and the continent consumes very low level of energy about 6% of the entire global energy consumption. The government leaders and development partners have made various initiative to increase access to electricity but much of these efforts and progress made have been reversed due to population growth outpacing electrification rates, supply chain disruptions, and the economic consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic for both households and governments
There is a stark divide in global access to electricity between urban and rural areas. In 2020, 733 million people worldwide lacked access to electricity. Around 80 percent of those lived in rural areas. This is most evident in Sub-Saharan Africa, where almost 60 percent of people live in rural communities. In this region, the proportion of residents with electricity was 28 percent in rural areas compared to 78 percent in urban areas in 2020. Overall, in Sub-Saharan Africa, approximately 476 million rural residents lack access to electricity. (WB, 2023).
Furthermore, the continent’s population is further expected to rise from 1.4 billion to 2.5 billion by 2050 while the energy supply in the continent can’t keep up with the pace of the increasing energy demand which is why interventions are needed to ensure energy security in the continent one of them will be the strategies laid down in the Africa energy summit.
In Tanzania, despite a number of efforts and initiatives undertaken by the government including the Energy Policy Act (2015), Tanzania Rural Electrification Expansion program (TREEP), National Rural Electrification Program (NREP), establishment of Rural energy Agency (REA), The sustainable energy for all gender action plan (2018) as well as investment in electricity infrastructures household access to electricity is still low. Only 45.8% of the Tanzania population has access to electricity and it is particularly low in the rural areas where only 36% of the rural population have access to electricity in comparison to the 74.7% of the urban population (WB, 2020). This falls short of the sustainable goal of energy for all which aimed at achieving 75% connectivity by 2025 and universal access by 2030.
Therefore, the mission 300 represents an ambitious initiative which will combine increased infrastructure investments and comprehensive policy reforms across the entire electricity supply chain breaking down from continental strategies to regional target and how each country will incorporate the agreed upon strategies in their policies and initiatives so as to ensure that the mission 300 is achieved as projected as access to energy is crucial not only for the attainment of health and education outcomes, but also for reducing the cost of doing business and for unlocking economic potential and creating jobs.
REFERENCES:
World Bank Group. (2025). Mission 300 is powering Africa: Mission 300 Africa Energy Summit.
CSIS. (2024). Achieving Universal Energy Access in Africa amid Global De-carbonization.
World Bank Blog (2023). Access to Universal and Sustainable electricity: Meeting the Challenge.