Funding for African energy projects needs scaling up, fast

A topic that really loomed large at the African Energy Week 2024 conference is the need to scale up investment in African energy, highlighted International Energy Agency (IEA) deputy executive director Mary Burce Warlick, in her address to the conference, at the Cape Town International Convention Centre, on Tuesday. Africa, she pointed out, contains 20% of the world’s population but is the site of only 4% of global energy investment. Indeed, over the past ten years, investment in the African energy sector had been falling. “It’s way below what the continent needs,” she stressed. Lowering the cost of capital for investments in African energy projects was “critical”.