7 September 2015 - Africa’s power sector struggles under low access and insufficient capacity. Only 35 percent of the population of Sub-Sahara Africa, including South Africa, has access to electricity while more than 90 percent of the populations of Burundi, Chad, Liberia, Malawi, and South Sudan lack access to a power grid. Most African countries, except South Africa, face severe power generation capacity deficits even compared to international peers of similar economic size.
Sub-Sahara Africa is distinguished by its reliance on renewable power sources. About 70 percent of Sub-Sahara Africa's energy comes from renewables, particularly hydroelectric sources, according to the World Bank. As a result, the renewables sector has encouraged robust foreign investment. For example, nearly three quarters of the total $41.6 billion energy-sector investment from China during the period 2005-2014 targeted hydropower.
Even with the investment appeal of nonfossil fuel power generation, total investment into Africa’s energy sector falls well short of the required level to enable faster growth. The slow pace of infrastructure development leads the US Energy Information Administration to project that total energy consumption in Africa will increase by only 24 percent during the next ten years. In addition, investment in Africa’s energy sector is often “bring-your-own-infrastructure” in nature, forcing companies to build their own power stations for other enterprise projects and lacking a national-level oversight to ensure targeted build-out and connectivity. Without such strategic oversight, impoverished populations are seldom able to provide enough demand to ensure self-sufficiency of new power stations to attract investment.
Sources: IMF World Economic Outlook (WEO), April 2015 , EIA International Energy Statistics, The World Bank World Development Indicators, The China Global Investment Tracker, June 2015.
The South African economy exhibited weak quarter-on-quarter real GDP growth earlier this year and faces high and rising unemployment, weak domestic demand, and falling market prices on key export commodities. Accelerated growth is on the horizon for South Africa, however, according to consensus forecasts of multiple major international agencies, even if at a slower rate than other large sub-saharan African economies. African countries collectively are expected to be the most rapidly growing economies worldwide during the next five years.South Africa is currently the third largest African economy by GDP (ppp) following Nigeria and Egypt and...
The sessions scheduled to take place during this two-day Summit will include: the importance of community-centric mini grids in energy access; developing a regulatory framework to drive renewable energy development in East Africa; the African renewable energy initiative: unlocking the potential of Africa’s energy future; attracting capital to develop renewable energy projects; harnessing solar power potential in Sub-Saharan Africa; exploiting the full potential of hydropower prospects in East Africa; wind power, geothermal, biomass and hybrid projects; and energy efficiency and renewables development. Source: Africa Renewable Energy...
Zambia is a copper-rich African country that just three years ago was the darling of international investors seeking to expand their mineral portfolios. Mining investment - encouraged by privatization of the copper mines in the late 1990s - and the copper price boom that started in late 2008 served to support the sustained economic growth the country had achieved since implementing measures in 2004 to support greater fiscal discipline. Leading multinational mining companies, including Barrick Gold Corp., First Quantum Minerals Ltd. and Glencore PLC, have become major investors in Zambia's mining industry. Zambia's fortunes have turned,...