The Mission 300 Africa Energy Summit, also known as the African Heads of State Energy Summit, which was held in Dar Es Salam from January 27 to 28, 2025, was a landmark event in Africa’s search for a solution to her energy poverty. It specifically addressed the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG7), aimed at “ensuring that everyone has access to affordable, reliable, modern, and sustainable energy by 2030.” Inspired by SDG7, Mission 300 aims to bring electricity to 300 million Africans by 2030, especially targeting underserved and unserved communities all over Africa—and do so sustainably and innovatively. Dr Akinwunmi Adesina, President of the African Development Bank, and Dr Makhtar Diop, Managing Director of the International Finance Corporation, the private-sector financing arm of the World Bank Group, and former Vice President for Infrastructure at the World Bank, envisioned Mission 300 and announced its launch at the 2023 United Nations General Assembly.
The summit was jointly organised by the government of Tanzania, which was the host, the African Development Bank, the World Bank Group, and the African Union, which mobilised African heads of state and government to attend, and supported by other global partners, including the United Nations, regional development banks, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP), and Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL).
Sub-Saharan Africa currently experiences the highest rate of energy poverty globally, with more than half of its population of over 1.2 billion people without access to affordable and reliable electricity. This has had far-reaching social and economic implications for education, health, agricultural practices, manufacturing, commerce, and micro and small enterprises, as well as forcing a great number of Africans to resort to the use of unsafe/polluting fuels for cooking and heating as a result of poor public power supply infrastructure and issues of affordability. Thus, access to reliable, clean, and affordable power supply is a major sustainable development issue in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Against the foregoing background, the Mission 300 Energy Summit sought to nudge Sub-Saharan African leaders to introduce and accelerate reforms that could be transformational in addressing access to energy, to find solutions to poor access to electricity by over 600 million people, most of who live in rural communities; promote regulatory and policy adjustments to create an enabling environment for energy sector development, secure financing especially from various climate-related multilateral sources, mobilise investments for energy projects, particularly from private sector sources, prioritising renewable and off-grid solutions, and with a “strong emphasis on clean cooking solutions to avoid 600,000 deaths annually due to smoke exposure.” So, the conference was not just about providing access to power for another 300 million Africans, but with an emphasis on underserved and unserved populations and communities and to do so innovatively, sustainably, and affordably using methods that include renewable energy and off-grid solutions.
“Sub-Saharan Africa currently experiences the highest rate of energy poverty globally, with more than half of its population of over 1.2 billion people without access to affordable and reliable electricity.”
There was tremendous goodwill at the conference, with heads of multilateral institutions pushing hard to convince African leaders that the goal of providing access to power to 300 million Africans by 2030 is achievable. Dr. Akinwunmi Adesina emphasised practical solutions to realising the ambitious goal of Mission 300, from regulatory reforms to private sector engagement. Mr. Ajaypal Singh ‘Ajay’ Banga, President of the World Bank, drew attention to the link between poor access to power and Africa’s employment challenges, stating that 300 million young Africans will enter the labour market in the next ten years, but only 150 million jobs will be created. Dr Rajiv Shah, President of the Rockefeller Foundation highlighted the appalling situation where 600 million Africans lack access to power and another 500 million lack affordable productive power. He however hoped the Mission 300 initiative will succeed where previous ones have failed, because the “initiative is driven by African leadership, backed by substantial concessional resources, and powered by collaborative partnership.”
By the initiative being “driven by African leadership,” Dr Shah may not have been necessarily referring to African political leadership either at the national or continental level, as Mission 300 is entirely the multilateral initiative of the African Development Bank and the World Bank Group. However, he would be quite right if he meant African leadership at the continental-institutional level, specifically the African Development Bank and the African Union Commission Secretariat. Dr Akinwunmi Adesina, President of the African Development Bank, for example, has become the poster boy of Africa’s bold vision for transformational change and leadership. Similar sentiments could be expressed about Dr Makhtar Diop and other top-level African international technocrats, and the leadership of the AU Commission/the technocrats at the NEPAD-AU Development Agency, which is the implementing arm of AU Agenda 2063. These are the ‘African leaders’ who have the capacity to drive the realisation of Mission 300, who can also prod African political leaders at the national level into self-belief for transformational change for the realisation of Mission 300.
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The major pathway to realising Mission 300 seems to be mobilising African governments to partner with private sector leaders and development partners through a massive collaborative effort; and the focus on national energy compacts by 12 African countries, including Nigeria, outlining country-specific action plans.
It should be noted that the emphasis of Mission 300 is addressing energy poverty in Sub-Saharan African countries. North African countries have all achieved energy security, with the exception of Libya, due to its many years of devastating turmoil. The participation of North African countries was essentially to showcase their success stories and how they can help Sub-Saharan African countries overcome their energy challenges. A case in point is Morocco’s success story in renewable energy with the ‘Noor-Oarzazate’ complex, considered the world’s largest concentrated solar energy plant. This adds another dimension to realising Mission 300: intra-African collaborations and technical assistance from the African energy ‘superpowers’ of South Africa, Egypt, Algeria, and Morocco.
Mr Igbinoba is Team Lead/CEO at ProServe Options Consulting, Lagos
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