Wikipedia Deep Dive

Energy in Africa

13 min read

Here's a paradox that defines an entire continent: Africa exports more energy than it consumes, yet more than 500 million Africans live without electricity. The continent sits atop some of the world's richest deposits of oil, gas, coal, and uranium—and yet the average person in Sub-Saharan Africa uses the same amount of electricity in an entire year that someone in the United States burns through in about three and a half weeks.

This isn't a story about scarcity. It's a story about infrastructure, investment, and the peculiar economics of energy poverty.

A Continent of Contradictions

Africa is the world's third-largest holder of crude oil reserves, trailing only the Middle East and Latin America. It ranks third in natural gas, second in uranium. The Democratic Republic of the Congo alone has enough hydroelectric potential that, if harnessed, it could power much of the continent—and the Energy Economics journal has calculated that importing that power to replace South African coal plants would eliminate 40 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually.

And yet.

The World Bank has declared 32 of the continent's 48 nations to be in an energy crisis. In some remote regions, fewer than one in twenty households has electricity. The manufacturing sector across Sub-Saharan Africa loses power, on average, 56 days per year. In Burundi, the lights go out for nearly half the year—144 days of blackouts annually.

This creates a brutal economic trap. Frequent power outages damage equipment, destroy sales, and scare away international investors. As the periodical African Business has noted, poor power supplies have "stunted the growth of domestic companies and discouraged foreign firms from setting up manufacturing plants." Without reliable electricity, factories can't operate. Without factories, economies can't grow. Without economic growth, there's no capital to build the power plants that would provide reliable electricity.

The Numbers That Tell the Story

Consider this comparison: the entire economy of Africa is roughly equivalent to that of the Netherlands—a country of 17 million people compared to a continent of over a billion. This works out to approximately six percent of the United States economy.

From 2001 to 2005, the economies of more than half the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa grew by over 4.5 percent annually. That sounds promising until you learn that electrical generation capacity grew at just 1.2 percent over the same period. The continent was running faster while its energy infrastructure fell further behind.

The electricity that does exist is expensive. Protective tariffs in Sub-Saharan Africa run about 13 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared to 4 to 8 cents in the rest of the developing world. Even if you can get connected to the grid, you might not be able to afford to stay connected.

Only about 10 percent of Africans have access to the electrical grid at all. Of those lucky few, three-quarters come from the wealthiest two-fifths of the population. In Malawi, Ethiopia, Niger, and Chad, fewer than 2 percent of rural residents have electrical power.

The pattern is clear: electricity in Africa reaches the wealthy, the urban, and the commercial—while bypassing the rural poor entirely.

Why Progress Has Stalled

Here's what makes Africa's energy situation particularly frustrating: access rates haven't meaningfully improved since the 1980s. While the rest of the developing world expanded electrical grid distribution by 20 percent, Sub-Saharan Africa stayed flat. It's actually the only region on Earth where per-capita energy access is falling.

The electrical industry faces what economists call a fundamental dilemma. Raising prices would help utilities afford to build more infrastructure, but higher prices would also price out the very customers who need electricity most. They need capital to expand, but they can't get capital without more customers, and they can't get more customers without expanding first.

Geography doesn't help either. Many countries with exportable resources are landlocked, without transportation systems to move those resources to market. You might be sitting on a fortune in oil or minerals, but if you can't get it to a port, it might as well not exist.

The Renewable Potential Nobody's Using

Less than one percent of Africa's electricity comes from renewable resources. That statistic alone should stop you cold—because Africa has staggering renewable potential that remains almost entirely untapped.

Only 5 to 7 percent of the continent's hydroelectric potential has been developed. Geothermal energy—the heat from underground that can generate electricity—sits at just 0.6 percent utilization. A 2011 assessment estimated Africa's geothermal capacity at 14,000 megawatts, of which only 60 megawatts had been captured.

The African Energy Policy Research Network has calculated something remarkable: agricultural waste alone—the leftover material from farming—could meet the electrical needs of 16 southeastern African countries through a process called bagasse-based cogeneration. Bagasse is the fibrous residue left after sugarcane is crushed for juice; burn it in the right kind of plant and it generates both heat and electricity simultaneously.

Mauritius already demonstrates what's possible. The sugar industry there provides 25 percent of the country's energy from byproduct cogeneration. With wider adoption and process improvements, that could expand by a factor of thirteen.

Solar potential is particularly striking in North Africa, where the Sahara receives some of the most intense and consistent sunlight on Earth. The total installed power capacity in North Africa reached about 61.6 gigawatts in 2012, with hydroelectric making up about 10 percent—but solar has barely begun to be exploited.

The Regional Breakdown

Energy resources in Africa aren't distributed evenly. Understanding the geography helps explain both the opportunities and the obstacles.

North Africa dominates in oil and gas. Libya alone holds approximately 50 percent of all African oil reserves—a concentration of wealth that has shaped the region's politics and economy for decades. Algeria adds significant natural gas to the equation. Libya has pledged 5 billion dollars toward programs designed to reduce carbon emissions, an acknowledgment that even fossil fuel exporters must eventually transition.

Southern Africa tells a different story. This region contains 91 percent of all African coal reserves and 70 percent of the continent's uranium. South Africa by itself possesses the sixth-largest coal reserves on the planet, trailing only China, the United States, India, Russia, and Australia. Coal has powered South African industrialization—but at an enormous environmental cost.

The renewable alternatives exist. South Africa has access to solar, wind, hydropower, wave energy, and bioenergy. The challenge isn't finding the resources; it's building the infrastructure to capture them.

Central Africa holds the hydroelectric crown, thanks to the multiple great rivers flowing through the region. The Congo River system alone represents one of the world's largest untapped sources of renewable electricity. The challenge here is political as much as technical—the Democratic Republic of the Congo has struggled with decades of conflict and governance problems that make massive infrastructure projects extraordinarily difficult.

East Africa has its own emerging story around geothermal power. The East African Rift, the same geological feature that's slowly splitting the continent apart, provides access to underground heat that could generate substantial electricity. Kenya and Ethiopia have both begun developing this resource, though progress remains slow.

The Human Cost of Energy Poverty

When we talk about energy access in abstract terms—percentages and megawatts and grid coverage—it's easy to lose sight of what energy poverty actually means for the people living it.

Most African agriculture still relies primarily on human and animal power. Farmers till fields by hand or with oxen while their counterparts in developed countries operate GPS-guided tractors. The productivity gap is enormous, and it constrains how much food Africa can grow to feed its rapidly expanding population.

In Zambia, the crisis became acute starting in June 2017. Poor rainfall reduced hydroelectric output—the country depends heavily on water-powered generators—triggering eight-hour blackouts in the capital city of Lusaka. Families who had grown accustomed to electric stoves went back to cooking over simple charcoal fires. The modern economy they'd been building retreated toward the past.

Without electricity, there's no refrigeration to preserve food or medicine. No lights to extend productive hours after dark. No computers to connect to the global economy. No power tools to manufacture goods efficiently. Each missing piece constrains what's possible.

The Indian economist Amartya Sen developed what he called the Capabilities Approach to understanding poverty. His insight was that poverty isn't just about lacking money—it's about lacking the capabilities to live a full life. "Relative deprivation in terms of incomes," he wrote, "can yield absolute deprivation in terms of capabilities."

Energy is a capability multiplier. With reliable electricity, a person gains access to education (reading after dark, computers for learning), to economic opportunity (manufacturing, modern agriculture, internet commerce), to health (refrigerated medicine, powered medical equipment, safe water treatment). Without it, all these doors remain closed.

Environmental Pressures and Deforestation

Energy poverty drives environmental destruction in ways that aren't immediately obvious. When people lack access to electricity or modern fuels, they turn to what's available: wood.

Deforestation across Africa stems partly from this desperate search for fuel. Families need to cook. Without gas or electricity, they burn wood or charcoal. Multiply this across hundreds of millions of households, and forests disappear. The loss of forests accelerates erosion, degrades agricultural land, disrupts water cycles, and contributes to the famines that periodically devastate parts of the continent.

Clean energy development could break this cycle. Biodiesel technology, for instance, offers potential for job creation in rural communities while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Solar power could provide cooking energy without cutting trees. But the upfront capital costs remain a critical barrier—the same economic trap that constrains the electrical industry more broadly.

Electronic Waste and Toxic Trade

There's another energy-related crisis unfolding in countries like Nigeria, one that illustrates how the developing world often bears the environmental costs of the developed world's consumption.

Nigeria has become a dumping ground for discarded electronic products from wealthier nations. Old computers, phones, and appliances contain valuable metals—but they also contain toxic ones. Lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, antimony, and trioxide leach from these devices into water sources. When the plastic casings are burned to extract metals, they release carcinogenic dioxins and polyaromatic hydrocarbons. Barium and other chemicals seep into the soil.

The 1989 Basel Convention established an international treaty designed to regulate hazardous waste shipments to the developing world. But enforcement remains weak, and the electronics trade continues. Countries desperate for any economic activity accept imports they probably shouldn't, trading environmental damage for short-term income.

Points of Progress

Not everything about African energy is a story of stagnation and crisis. Recent developments offer genuine hope.

Ghana increased electricity access by 500 percent between 1991 and 2000—a dramatic expansion that brought millions of people onto the grid for the first time. The troubling footnote is that per capita consumption actually fell over the same period, suggesting that the electricity being provided remained unaffordable for many new customers. Still, the infrastructure exists now. The challenge has shifted from building the grid to making its power accessible.

The off-grid solar industry across Sub-Saharan Africa has expanded rapidly over the past decade. Solar home systems—small panels that can power lights, charge phones, and run small appliances—have brought electricity to rural areas the grid may never reach. It's not full electrification, but it's a dramatic improvement over kerosene lamps and darkness.

Norway has supported programs to replace kerosene lamps with solar alternatives in Kenya, to expand energy access in Ethiopia's rural areas, and to help Liberia develop a climate plan. International development assistance, while never sufficient, has begun to focus on energy access as a fundamental driver of economic development.

Kenya and Uganda have organized energy plans that integrate sustainable resource use with wildlife management and coastal zone protection. The goal is development that doesn't destroy the environmental foundations it depends on—a difficult balance but an essential one.

Tanzania has focused on biodiversity conservation in coastal districts, promoting sustainable marine resource management and small-scale enterprise development. These programs recognize that energy development must work with local ecosystems, not against them.

The Scale of What's Required

Population growth adds urgency to every aspect of Africa's energy challenge. Sub-Saharan Africa's population grows at 2.2 percent annually. By some estimates, the continent will hold over a billion people by 2025. If energy infrastructure doesn't expand dramatically faster than it has been, environmental and social problems could double or triple.

The International Energy Agency reports that between 2020 and 2022, electricity usage in Africa increased by over 100 percent. That's remarkable growth—and it was met primarily by burning more natural gas. In 2022, nearly 75 percent of all electricity produced in Africa came from fossil fuels: natural gas, coal, and oil.

This creates a climate dilemma. Africa has contributed least to the greenhouse gas emissions driving global climate change, yet it stands to suffer most from the droughts, floods, and temperature extremes that change will bring. Developing with fossil fuels, as wealthier nations did, would add to the very problem that threatens Africa most. But building renewable infrastructure requires capital that poor countries don't have.

The White Paper on Energy Policy tried to address this dilemma, outlining objectives to "increase access to affordable energy services, improve energy governance, stimulate economic growth, manage energy-related environmental impacts, and ensure security of supply through diversification." These goals all point in the right direction. The question is whether investment will materialize at the scale required.

Looking Forward

Professor Akin Iwayemi of the University of Ibadan frames Africa's fundamental energy question clearly: the challenge is "providing and maintaining widespread access of the population to reliable and affordable supplies of environmentally cleaner energy to meet the requirements of rapid economic growth and improved living standards."

Every word in that sentence matters. Access must be widespread—not just for urban elites. Supply must be reliable—not subject to 56 days of annual blackouts. It must be affordable—not priced beyond what ordinary families can pay. And it should be environmentally cleaner—to avoid trading one crisis for another.

The resources exist. Africa has oil and gas it exports to the world. It has coal reserves and uranium deposits. It has hydroelectric potential barely touched, geothermal fields almost unexplored, solar radiation that could power cities. The gap between what's possible and what's happening represents one of the great challenges of our time.

Despite the off-grid solar industry's rapid expansion over the past decade, some 600 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa still lack access to power. That number should be shrinking every year. Instead, population growth often outpaces electrification. The percentage of people with power rises slightly while the absolute number without it stays stubbornly high or even increases.

Energy access isn't just an engineering problem or an economic problem. It's a problem that touches food security, water access, deforestation, climate change, public health, education, women's rights, and economic development all at once. Solving it requires not just power plants and transmission lines but governance reforms, transportation networks, trained workforces, and sustained international investment.

The continent that exports energy to the world still struggles to power its own homes. That contradiction defines the challenge. Addressing it could transform hundreds of millions of lives—and the planet's future along with them.