Prioritizing Renewable Energy Access in Africa’s COVID Recovery Strategies

Africa has a three-fold energy challenge. The first and the one that requires decisive and urgent action is the challenge of energy access. Estimates extensively quoted by the African Development Bank (AfDB), the International Energy Agency (IEA), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and national governmental agencies, indicate that half of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) or about 640 million people lack electricity. According to the AfDB, “per capita consumption of energy in sub-Saharan Africa (excluding South Africa) is 180 kWh, compared to 13,000 kWh per capita in the United States and 6,500 kWh in Europe”. Meanwhile, with biomass still the dominant source of household energy, clean cooking is yet to be a household norm as roughly 900 million people use traditional fuels. This level of energy poverty holds back both economic and sustainable development. Even before factoring in unreliable power supply in the region’s major urban centres, SSA has the lowest energy access in the world. (Corfee-Morlot, et al., 2019).

The second is a challenge of governance, understood as the structures and processes (Never, 2011) responsible for energy production and distribution. Africa’s electricity sector is dominated by centralized grid systems owned and controlled by state and private monopolies with little to no input from consumers. Despite being a public good in many countries, electricity production and distribution is market-driven and thus serves mainly urban markets where connections can be made at a profit. Even then, unreliable power supply means even urban dwellers do not have continuous access to electricity and in some countries, consumers usually have no recourse when they suffer damages due to unusual surges in the electric current running through their appliances. Whereas most African states provide some form on subvention for petroleum products such as petrol and cooking gas – distribution is equally limited to urban centres and to those who can afford it. Decades on oil extractions have produced little impacts on the continent and some (for example Meierding, 2011) have argued that this might be the most remarkable thing about Africa’s resource extraction history.

Finally, the continent faces an energy-climate challenge. Africa contributes less than 4% of global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions. However, in the last two decades, there has been a steady shift of global energy attention towards SSA, with new oil finds and an increased interest in the development of new coal plants. The Gulf of Guinea, in particular, is attractive as one of the few places in the world with potentially large undiscovered reservoirs of light sweet crude (Meierding, 2011).

This briefing paper explores how these challenges have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and offers suggestions on how to “build back better” by making renewable energy the central source of power.