Although small-scale solar providers focused on the rural off-grid market have been the darlings of the development world, they generate just enough electricity to power more than a few basic appliances such as light bulbs, fans, and televisions. These improvements are undoubtedly an important improvement, but the vision for energy access should embrace a more comprehensive and robust potential. Improvements in quality of life and productivity should be the centerpiece of the agenda for powering Africa. A sustainable vision is required to identify feasible, durable solutions. Unless government and industry stakeholders invest in larger renewable systems, we will continue to champion an unsustainable model of sustainable development.

While African governments have increasingly framed renewable energy as the linchpin of their climate change and development strategies, solar energy still remains largely dependent on public sector capital from sources like the World Bank and the African Development Bank. At present, Africa lacks sufficient investment to fund enough energy projects to achieve universal energy access by 2030. In 2015, the African Progress Panel found that current energy-sector investments in Africa are about US$8 billion a year—less than one-sixth of the US$55 billion per year required to meet electrification targets. And even those funds won’t meet the renewable energy sector’s financing needs.

According to a recent Power for All report, only 11 percent of World Bank energy access funding and 1 percent of African Development Bank funding went to decentralized renewables between 2011 and 2014. With climate mitigation funding in flux due to the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, Africa’s solar industry must rapidly develop more capital-efficient ways to reach consumers outside of the grant-based or subsidized rural electrification model or risk future impediments to growth.

Solar companies providing subsistence-level energy to consumers with poor economic prospects have provided an important basis for the industry’s development. Investors betting on the off-grid rural market are right about the transformative impacts of models like M-KOPA, which enables customers to repay the cost of a $200 entry-level solar system over time. These systems provide the means for children to read at night, and they improve household health by reducing reliance on dirty fuels like kerosene. However, if these investors hope to generate long-term growth and improve economic livelihoods, solar systems must be able to generate enough output to power products like refrigeration, which improve food security, or irrigation and agricultural machinery, which enable productivity in the increasingly promising smallholder-led agricultural industry in sub-Saharan Africa.

Likewise, water heating is a staple and important aspect of daily urban living. Enhanced access to electricity shouldn’t just be a stop-gap solution: it should provide a means of reducing poverty and create better conditions for healthier, more financially stable lives in the long-term. As governments and development partners work to catalyze Africa’s green revolution, energy generation must play an essential part of the story. In Kenya, for example, energy accounts for nearly 15 percent of agricultural input costs. Harnessing enough energy to enable customers to expand their discretionary income is a critical path to improving the customer experience while also helping the energy industry’s profit margins—everybody wins. Electrification efforts that focus solely on basic solutions will not uplift the continent as a whole.

For renewable energy to create scaled impact, greater focus is needed on urban and peri-urban locales, which are often neglected in the race to power Africa. The sheer number of customers in urban areas means that efforts to improve electrification among all residents will reduce marketing and distribution costs. Although the electricity deficit is most stark in rural villages, the continent’s most developed cities from Nairobi to Johannesburg also confront irregular power, which, given the rapid urbanization trends in Africa, will become an ever-greater problem as more slums spring up on the urban periphery.

According to the Honourable Akinwumi Ambode, Governor of Lagos State, nearly 86 people enter Lagos every minute of the day—a rate 10 times that of New York. As new settlements crop up, the grid has yet to keep pace with the scale of development. Because the cost of solar power has gone down by 80 percent since 2010, renewable energy solutions have become an increasingly appealing option to expand access to energy in urban environments, the primary drivers for Africa’s economic growth. In these environments, community-level mini-grids and individual solar home systems are models that can deliver higher returns for customers and solar providers alike. Expansion of solar provision in urban areas can subsidize the costs of expansion of solar power in rural communities, and translate into a more commercially sustainable approach to achieve universal and, equally as important, reliable electricity access for more Africans.

As hubs of innovation, urban areas also offer more opportunities to experiment with various types of solar solutions on a large scale. It is hard to imagine testing a scalable power system in a small village—distribution and maintenance would be expensive due to infrastructural and access issues, and piloting a scalable system in a population-limited area is difficult.

Urban settings are ideal testing grounds because research shows that innovation in urban areas grows at the same rate as populations because it increases more opportunities for personal interaction and leads to exposure to new ideas. Directing more investment towards urban energy solutions can improve local resilience by helping balance the over-stretched power grids found in most African countries, and facilitating nationwide energy efficiency.

Expanding electrification in rural Africa is an important step towards building an inclusive future, but the solar industry’s preoccupation with last-mile off-grid solutions will not deliver transformative growth for the continent. Empowering entrepreneurs at a scale that enables them to grow their businesses and generate more economic employment will require firms and investors alike to balance urban with rural concerns, and immediate energy access with a longer-term, sustainable vision.

By Ademola Adesina is the Founder and CEO of Rensource, a West Africa-focused distributed energy services company.

Many African countries are struggling badly to finance their energy requirements. For example, virtually no African electricity utilities have an “investment-grade” rating which prevents them from raising debt at reasonable rates in order to finance their energy projects.

Projects backed by publicly-owned energy providers also encounter certain limits. Long development lead times together with uncertainty over government commitments to purchase volumes produced – key to any financing project – have led some African countries to entrust energy production to the private sector.

Developing IPPs in Africa

In a bid to leverage the Continent’s vast solar capacities, wind and water resources, many corporations are turning to IPP-type private projects (“Independent power projects”, in industry jargon), primarily to meet their own needs, before transferring any energy left over to the grid. As the authorised production threshold has been raised, the number of such independent projects to produce energy for own-use has grown.

Although the situation varies by country, Africa has enacted a series of sector-based legislation over the past few years, such as Law 13-09 in Morocco 1. This allows programmes to produce energy with an installed capacity of up to 50MW to apply for authorisation from the Moroccan Energy Ministry. Any surplus must be sold exclusively to ONEE (the national electricity and water agency), with whom the independent producer must negotiate a transport agreement and a connection agreement (for the transfer of any surplus energy produced).

Other factors have also contributed to the success of IPPs in Africa: deregulation (albeit partial) of the energy sector, increasing demand for energy and the availability of special purpose financing, all supported by government guarantees to purchase power produced.

Development finance institutions (DFIs) have also played a key role alongside financing from foreign backers, especially Chinese concessional lenders and private investors. It is estimated that energy projects attracted USD 14 billion worth of financing in 2014, the bulk of which came from concessional loans put up by China Exim Bank.

Very welcome structural reforms

Participation in private sector financing is therefore an opportunity not to be missed. However, most African governments continue to regulate their national energy sectors via a single publicly-owned utility. This is still the case in Benin, Burkina Faso, Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Mali and Niger, to mention but the countries belonging to the CFA franc zone. Nevertheless, beginning in the 1990s, a number of countries began to introduce structural reforms designed to partially deregulate their vertically-integrated monopolistic utilities. South Africa was the first to do so, followed by Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda and then Kenya. A third category of countries – comprising Angola, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Madagascar, Morocco, Mauritius, Senegal and Togo – have continued with their monopolies but adopted legislation conducive to IPP-type structures. Indeed, within this category of countries, publicly-owned agencies frequently acquire stakes in dedicated IPP project companies, generating a hybrid market with all sorts of complex governance-related issues. While the existence of an independent regulator may be seen as a safeguard for reassuring investors it does not appear to be an absolute imperative.

Although structural reform has undoubtedly resulted in better governance in the energy sector and an environment that is more conducive to IPPs, widespread financial mismanagement of publicly-owned bodies means that private electricity buyers are becoming more and more common in the industry. Nevertheless, there has to be sufficient industrial demand. Madagascar is a case in point. A number of hydroelectricity projects have been launched by JIRAMA, the public water and electricity utility, however, firm credible commitments to purchase power could not currently be secured for the total cumulative installed capacity of the projects due to the serious financial difficulties of the public energy body. Even by trying to sell to the private sector, there is no guarantee that the shortfall in demand could be made up. Thence the African paradox: a lack of creditworthy customers alongside massive energy requirements!

Adopting and complying with best practices

Nevertheless, the success of IPPs is down to a number of best practices that include more effective coordination between the assessment of requirements and power purchase agreements (or PPAs), setting up a clear, predictable and transparent framework for transferring procurement documentation – even for private initiatives, and coherent decisions regarding project structure and power purchase tariffs.

As regards the first point, too many African countries still suffer from inadequate public policy planning tools in spite of loud media declarations concerning plans or strategies that are supposed to last for a generation. Apart from South Africa, very few governments have actually linked their energy planning requirements to energy procurement strictu sensu. Fragmented structures frequently hamper a coherent public policy capable of ensuring diversity in the energy mix, a network capable of absorbing new projects and consistent arrangements for organising and awarding tenders and concessions.

Procedures for awarding IPPs, even within a private framework, must be clear, comply with  principles of equal treatment of candidates and remain constant over time. This does not mean that they have to be rigid! In a rapidly changing market where technical advances and competitive pressures are tending to push down the cost of equipment and material, investors should be able to enjoy contractual stability and the gains generated from lower market prices should also be split among the different parties. This will ultimately result in lower prices for end consumers, particularly in projects where surplus power is purchased by the national utility.

Lastly, “feed-in tariff ” arrangements (FiT) do not have to be a dogma. While FiTs are attractive because they reassure investors and because they have been successfully used in countries like Kenya, Ghana and Senegal, they curb competition significantly.

The financial strength of “off-takers” (i.e., power buyers), the scalability of their industrial plan and the reliability of their power purchase commitments will all be key to the success of an IPP venture in Africa, especially where the public utility is insufficiently creditworthy to be able to purchase the energy produced over the long term.

By Hugues de La Forge, Partner – Holman Fenwick Willan

The math for Africa’s clean energy future is adding up. Solar lamps are spreading like fireflies across Ghana. A first-of-its-kind solar farm in Rwanda is providing electricity for 15,000 rural homes. Utility-scale solar and wind projects are being built in Morocco and Kenya. As technology costs keep tumbling, centralized and decentralized renewable projects such as these will become increasingly attractive, especially when compared with the costly diesel fuel generation that provides much of the continent’s power in rural areas.

Yet, as reporter Tom Jackson previously pointed out in this magazine, hundreds of millions of Africans — including more than 75 percent of the populations in countries such as Ethiopia, Sierra Leone and Uganda — are still living without power. The gap is especially glaring in sub-Saharan African countries, which account for 13 percent of the world’s population but a whopping 48 percent of the global population without access to electricity. Even those who have electricity face very high prices for insufficient and unreliable supplies.

The continent’s continued dependence on yesterday’s energy solutions is due in large part to money — or the lack of it. There’s simply not enough investment capital flowing into African clean energy projects.

The dearth of private institutional investor capital, such as U.S. and European pension funds, which manage trillions of dollars, is especially glaring. While utility-scale projects such as Morocco’s 510-megawatt solar project and Kenya’s 300-MW wind project have secured key financing to begin construction — the first 160-MW phase of Morocco’s project will begin operating later this year — nearly all of the capital was from public sector sources such as the World Bank and African Development Bank.

It’s important these projects are being built. In fact, they were largely responsible for global clean energy investments reaching a record US$131 billion last year in developing countries, including a highest-ever US$12.6 billion in Africa and the Middle East. Two African countries, South Africa and Kenya, attracted more than US$1 billion in clean energy investments in 2014.But public investment is not enough. Despite having a staggering potential solar capacity — an estimated 8.8 million MW in sub-Saharan Africa alone, according to management consulting firm McKinsey — renewable energy installations are not happening at nearly the rate necessary to reach the Clean Trillion goal of more than quadrupling investments in global clean energy by 2030.

“Private-sector involvement is critical and central to effectively delivering new capacity [in Africa],” concludes McKinsey’s recentPowering Africa report.

In sub-Saharan Africa alone, an additional US$450 billion in power-sector capital investment is needed to cut power outages in half and achieve universal energy access in urban areas by 2040, according to the IEA’s Africa Energy Outlook report. Mini-grids and off-grid systems, especially those using solar, hydro and wind, hold especially strong promise to bring substantially more power to rural areas, the IEA report concludes.

So what’s keeping investors on the sidelines in Africa, home of many of the world’s fastest growing economies?

It’s about creating trust. Investors hate risk — whether real or perceived. They need assurances that regulations are stable and will not shift. They need to be absolutely sure that their investments, whether direct or indirect, will generate reliable, attractive long-term returns.

Let’s start with government signals. More African countries need to adopt targets, policies and regulations that support renewable energy production. A case in point is Sierra Leone, which still makes it very hard for independent power producers to operate. An encouraging sign is a growing number of African countries —Egypt, Kenya, Uganda and South Africa, among them — now have feed-in policies where the government guarantees a price (often at a premium) to compensate producers for certain types of renewable energy. Rwanda is another: The country has set ambitious goals to expand renewable energy and recently unveiled the region’s first solar mini-grid, serving 15,000 rural households.

Enacting policies to reduce capital costs and risks is also important. Governments can help reduce transaction costs by promoting contract standardization and securitization.

De-risking policies can also help. A key reason Kenya’s US$1 billion wind project near Lake Turkana is moving forward, for example, is that the African Development Bank provided US$24.5 million in risk guarantees to cover potential delays in finishing a key transmission line, which is crucial for the project.

The fact that many sustainable energy projects are too small to attract large investment funds is another hurdle. One type of financing innovation that offers early promise in some emerging markets is that of Yieldscos, publicly traded companies that finance new clean energy projects by offering investors the promise of steady dividends based on project cash flows. Among those taking advantage is Sun Edison’s Yieldco, TerraForm Global, which operates clean energy plants in South Africa, India and several other countries generating nearly 1,000 MW.

It’s easy to quibble that more must be done to smooth Africa’s operating environment for renewables, but evidence is growing that clean energy is gaining ground and opportunities exist.

Success breeds success. As more financing innovations are utilized and more projects are successfully completed, investors — especially private institutional investors — will have no choice but to join Africa’s clean energy future.

By Peyton Fleming