In 2024, Africa added just 4 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity to its grids. The world added 585 gigawatts. Africa holds the planet’s greatest untapped renewable potential — yet, according to IEA estimates for 2025, the continent accounts for just 2% of global clean energy investment. The problem, as Kenya’s Special Climate Envoy Ali Mohamed put it at the Africa Climate Summit, is not ambition. It is the financing gap.
That gap is quantifiable. Africa needs $100 billion annually to reach its Nairobi Declaration target of 300 gigawatts of renewable capacity by 2030. In 2024, renewable energy investment reached approximately $40 billion — a dramatic rise from $2.6 billion in 2021, but still $60 billion short of what is needed. The distance between ambition and capital is not ideological. It is structural.
African energy developers — particularly smaller and community-serving organisations — consistently struggle to access the full range of available instruments: concessional loans through mechanisms such as the AfDB’s Sustainable Energy Fund for Africa (SEFA), blended structures that de-risk projects for commercial co-investors, green bonds, and pay-as-you-go impact models. The barrier is not the availability of finance. It is the absence of bankable project documentation, environmental and social impact assessments, and off-take agreements that satisfy DFI fiduciary standards.
Project Drawdown’s 2025 analysis notes that multilateral development banks must lead through blended finance, offering long-term concessional loans and de-risking first-mover projects — but also that energy finance in Africa too often reflects donor priorities or corporate returns rather than African community needs. SEFA itself has demonstrated that catalytic finance works: in 2024 alone, it backed 14 projects adding 840 megawatts and 1.5 million new electricity connections across five countries.
The opportunity is clear and urgent. African development organisations working in energy access must invest in the project preparation capabilities — technical due diligence, regulatory navigation, and impact documentation — that transform viable community energy propositions into fundable transactions. Blended finance works best when there is a clear structure for risk-sharing, strong governance, and transparent reporting from the outset. Capital mobilisers who build this infrastructure now will be first in line for the next wave of DFI allocations. The pipeline exists. The preparation does not yet — but it can.
