Mission 300’s acceleration of electricity in Africa

Mission 300 — the initiative led by the World Bank Group and the African Development Bank Group to connect 300 million people across Africa to electricity by 2030 — has just reached a remarkable milestone. Over 50 million people have been connected to electricity since the initiative launched and began tracking results in July 2023. Behind that number are households with lights on after dark, health clinics able to refrigerate vaccines, small businesses able to extend their working day, and students able to study in the evening. This is what progress looks like — and it is just the beginning.

To understand why this milestone matters, it helps to understand what Mission 300 actually is. It is an initiative to accelerate, coordinate, and scale electricity access in Africa across both newly approved operations and an existing portfolio of active investments, reforms, and partnerships, irrespective of when the underlying operations were approved. It is not a single project with a single budget and a single implementation team.

Electricity access for 300 million people by 2030 cannot be achieved only through projects approved after the Mission 300 launch date.

Large energy infrastructure programs take years to begin delivering results. Any serious electrification strategy at this scale must engage the full portfolio of available investments — while mobilizing the new financing, policy reforms, country compacts, and implementation support needed to move faster. National energy compacts, which have been adopted by 36 Mission 300 countries, are accelerating electricity access by addressing sectoral bottlenecks that have hampered faster delivery of existing projects and the development of new ones. Mission 300’s ambition was to change the pace of electrification and the results reflect genuine, measurable acceleration.

None of this happens in isolation: Mission 300’s reach and pace depend on a broad coalition of partners — from African governments to The Rockefeller Foundation, Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, SEforAll and numerous development partners — whose coordinated support turns financing and policy reform into connections on the ground.

Since the launch of Mission 300, the World Bank Group has been connecting people to electricity at close to twice the speed that prevailed when the initiative began. WBG-financed projects connected 12 million people between July 2023 and June 2024, the first year of the Mission 300 initiative. Through April of the current fiscal year alone — with May and June still to be counted — they had already connected 20 million more. That’s acceleration. African Development Bank Group’s supported operations have already reached 5.2 million people in under two and a half years compared to 9.6 million over the preceding 11 years. That too, is acceleration.

The results reported by the World Bank Group and the African Development Bank Group are based on a common Mission 300 methodology jointly agreed by both institutions, with the concurrence of the other partners and governments. Under this methodology, only verified household electricity connections delivered between July 1, 2023 and December 31, 2030 are counted, irrespective of when the underlying operation was approved. Reported results are sourced from project implementation units, utilities, private sector operators and government agencies responsible for delivering access outcomes. To ensure consistency, accuracy and credibility, all reported figures are subject to established quality assurance and validation processes within the results management systems of both institutions before being reflected in Mission 300 reporting.

This common methodology provides a transparent and harmonised framework for tracking progress towards Mission 300’s objective of connecting 300 million people in Africa to electricity by 2030, ensuring that results are based on verified access gains and are reported consistently across participating countries and programmes.

Mission 300’s trajectory is not accidental. It is the direct consequence of coordinated action across 40 countries, backed by rigorous methodology. Every result counted under Mission 300 must be tied to a Bank-financed operation and its verification systems. The data is available through the World Bank Group’s Mission 300 Progress Portal and the African Development Bank Group’s Mission 300 tracker.

World Bank Group project-level results data and methodological documentation are also publicly available through the Target Map platform, updated quarterly. The African Development Bank Mission 300 tracker is updated periodically as new validated results become available, and users can access the corresponding project pages and supporting documentation through MapAfrica to track results. Transparency is built into the design.

The country-level results bring this to life. Tanzania is among the initiative’s strongest performers, and for good reason. The Tanzania Rural Electrification Expansion Program, known as TREEP, has connected nearly 8 million people to electricity since its approval in 2016.

Approximately 5 million people connected after July 2023 by TREEP are counted under Mission 300, while a further 2.5 million people have been connected by follow-up project ASCENT Tanzania. Before Mission 300, WBG-financed projects connected roughly 2 million people in Tanzania across the entire five-year period from July 2018 to June 2023 — about 400,000 per year. Since July 2023, the rate has risen to approximately 2.5 million people per year. That is a five-fold increase in annual delivery, and it illustrates what intelligent program design and coordinated implementation can achieve.

Nigeria tells a similar story of scale and momentum across multiple instruments.

Nigeria’s 4.5 million newly connected people come from three distinct operations: the Nigeria Electrification Project, which accounts for 619,000 people; the Nigeria Distribution Sector Recovery Program, which accounts for 292,000; and Nigeria DARES, which accounts for 3.6 million. The majority of DARES results to date have come through performance-based grants for solar home systems and mini-grids — instruments that are already operational and delivering at scale. DARES intentionally builds on prior implementation experience, which is standard and sound program design. This is what continuity and replication at scale looks like in practice.

Beyond Tanzania and Nigeria, countries such as as Niger, Uganda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique as also making significant progress. The breadth of results across 40 countries is itself a demonstration of what Mission 300 makes possible.

Countries with large electricity access deficits and strong implementation momentum have consistently delivered large numbers, even prior to the launch of Mission 300. Ethiopia’s grid extension program, ELEAP, was already connecting more than 350,000 households per year in 2023. In Nigeria, in just the fourth quarter of 2022, the Nigeria Electrification Project reached 330,000 households, or 1.65 million people, through solar home systems alone. Mission 300 is building on this strong foundation, further accelerating and expanding successful programs like these.

The 50 million milestone is not an outlier — it is the predictable outcome of sustained investment, coordinated policy reform, and implementation at scale. The goal of 300 million people connected by 2030 remains ambitious.

But the trajectory is clear, the methodology is sound, and the results are real. Mission 300 is working — and the momentum it has built is changing lives across Africa.

Franz Drees-Gross, World Bank Group Director of Infrastructure, West Africa; and Wale Shonibare, African Development Bank Group Director, Energy Financial Solutions, Policy & Regulations,