We post here the relevant reports for the power sector in Africa. Feel free to join our efforts and share us any other you may have found. We'd be glad to add them to the list. Just sent an email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Browse by Region:
Publication date: July 2020
Author: ARE
Description: Electricity is a prerequisite to enable health services for every health care facility around the globe. While the struggle of rural communities to access quality health services has long been a critical issue, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the essential role that electricity plays in rural health care facilities.
Against this emergency background, DRE solutions offer the cleanest, cheapest and smartest solution to electrify rural health care facilities in most cases. DRE is not just an essential pillar to empower health care facilities and vulnerable citizens in their fight against COVID-19, but also a promising catalyst to power tomorrow’s local economies and speed up post-disease socio-economic recovery.
Download Report >>
Visit Website >>
Publication date: July 2020
Author: Oil Change International
Description: Renewable energy produced through off-grid and mini-grid wind and solar installations – called ‘distributed renewable energy’ – has consistently been identified as the most effective, affordable, and resilient way to deliver electricity services to rural areas without access. However, only about 1-2% of finance for electricity in Africa is currently flowing to distributed renewable energy. Of this, the vast majority has been for multinational companies that are based in Europe or North America or led by entrepreneurs from these regions, meaning profits are largely not remaining in Africa.
Download Report >>
Visit Website >>
Publication date: 24 June 2020
Author: RES4Africa Foundation
Description: For several weeks now, Africa has been fighting against an invisible enemy: COVID-19. Although the spread in the continent is much lower than in other parts of the world today, it is not less worrying considering the limited capabilities and resources of African countries to mitigate the potentially devastating effects of the virus, from a public health, social and economic context.
Limited access in the continent to electricity particularly in health centers and facilities increases the vulnerability to COVID-19. As Africa strives to sustain gains in reducing lack of access to electricity to more than 600 million people today, putting the access agenda among the priorities in the health sectors has become timely.
Download Report >>
Visit Website >>
Publication date: 10 June 2020
Author: Frankfurt School
Description: As COVID-19 hits the fossil fuel industry, the GTR 2020 shows that renewable energy is more cost-effective than ever – providing an opportunity to prioritize clean energy in economic recovery packages and bring the world closer to meeting the Paris Agreement goals.
Governments and companies around the world have committed to adding some 826 gigawatts of new non-hydro renewable power capacity in the decade to 2030, at a likely cost of around $1 trillion. Those commitments fall far short of what would be needed to limit world temperature increases to less than 2 degrees Celsius. They also look modest compared to the $2.7 trillion invested during the 2010-2019 decade, as recorded by this Global Trends report.
In 2019, the amount of new renewable power capacity added (excluding large hydro) was the highest ever, at 184 gigawatts, 20GW more than in 2018. Falling costs meant that this record commissioning of green gigawatts could happen in a year when dollar investment in renewable energy capacity stayed almost flat. In 2019, renewable energy capacity investment was $282.2 billion, just 1% higher than the previous year.
Download Report >>
Visit Website >>
Publication date: June 2020
Author: The World Bank
Description: Over the last decade, the solar power sector has seen installation costs fall dramatically and global installed capacity rise massively. The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) has reported that solar photovoltaic (PV) module prices have fallen 80% in the last decade, while installed capacity has grown from 40 GW to over 600 GW in the same period. These trends are set to continue with new global solar installations of over 140 GW expected in calendar year 2020.
Download Report >>
Publication date: June 2020
Author: IRENA
Description: Electricity costs from renewables have fallen sharply over the past decade, driven by improving technologies, economies of scale, increasingly competitive supply chains and growing developer experience. As a result, renewable power generation technologies have become the least-cost option for new capacity in almost all parts of the world. This new reality has been increasingly reflected in deployment, with 2019 seeing renewables account for 72% of all new capacity additions worldwide.
According to the latest cost data from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), the global weighted-average levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) of utility-scale solar photovoltaics (PV) fell 82% between 2010 and 2019, while that of concentrating solar power (CSP) fell 47%, onshore wind 39% and offshore wind 29% (Figure ES.1), the IRENA Renewable Cost Database shows.
Download Report >>
Visit Website >>
Publication date: May 2020
Author: IRENA
Description: This joint tracking report monitors and assesses global progress in the quest for sustainable, affordable, reliable and modern energy services for everyone. Published annually by the custodian agencies of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7 on energy, the report serves to guide international co-operation and policy-making to achieve universal, sustainable energy access by 2030.
Download Report >>
Visit Website >>
Publication date: May 2020
Author: United Nations Economic Commission for Africa
Description: Climate change is causing unprecedented variations in the frequency and magnitude ofextreme weather events: floods, droughts and heatwaves. How African countries prepare forand manage these extreme events will be fundamental to the performance of their economiesand realization of their development aspirations as embodied in various national developmentplans, the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the African Union’sAgenda 2063. Another key factor that will determine the attainment of Africa’s developmentobjectives is how the continent responds to its increasing need for access to adequate, secureand reliable energy services to industrialize, trade, provide better health and education services,reduce poverty and increase inclusion, boost economic growth and cater for population growth,a growing middle class, increasing urbanization and climate change.
Download Report >>
Visit Website >>
Publication date: May 2020
Author: Springer
Description: The decentralization of governance is increasingly considered crucial for delivering development and is being widely adopted in sub-Saharan countries. At the same time, distributed (decentralized) energy systems are increasingly recognized for their role in achieving universal access to energy and are being promoted in sub-Saharan countries. However, little attention has been paid by governments and energy practitioners to the dynamic interrelationships between national and local government and the role of governance decentralization in transitioning to distributed energy systems. This paper traces the complex relationships between accelerated delivery of distributed energy and decentralized local governance systems.
Download Report >>
Visit Website >>
Publication date: April 2020
Author: GIZ
Description: Over the last 15 years, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) has trialed, adjusted and refined approaches to providing technical assistance (TA) to governments interested in rural electrification with mini-grids. This report uses the wealth of experience gathered by various GIZ mini-grid programs and derives some essential lessons leading the way towards a new understanding of the role and aim of mini-grid TA.
Download Report >>
Publication date: April 2020
Author: IRENA
Description: The Global Renewables Outlook shows the path to create a sustainable future energy system. This flagship report highlights climate-safe investment options until 2050, the policy framework needed for the transition and the challenges faced by different regions. As the world seeks durable economic solutions, accelerated uptake of renewables promises to drive sustainable development, boost well-being and create tens of millions of new jobs.
Download Report >>
Visit Website >>
Publication date: 20 March 2020
Author: Powering Agriculture
Description: Innovators and entrepreneurs are introducing new technologies and business models that hold great promise for increasing agricultural productivity, reducing post-harvest loss and boosting farmer incomes in emerging markets. In the same way off-grid solar home systems commercialization has reached hundreds of millions of users, there is great potential for clean energy-agriculture solutions to grow exponentially given the right market conditions.
Download Report >>
Visit Website >>
Publication date: March 2020
Author: Africa Clean Energy
Description: Sub-Saharan African has made much progress with electrification. More than 20 million people gained access to electricity between 2014 and 2018. However, the region still faces the challenge of providing access to 595 million people who currently do not have access to electricity, and the growing population in electrified areas. In addition, electrification in the region has been quite uneven. As at 2018, only 25% of households in rural areas had access to electricity compared to 75% in urban areas.
Download Report >>
Visit Website >>
Publication date: March 2020
Author: ARE
Description: The number of people without access to modern forms of electricity still remains at a level of almost 1 billion. Access levels are unevenly distributed with especially Sub-Saharan African countries tailing behind on ambitions to reach universal access to electricity by 2030. Significantly more investments are needed to achieve SDG-7 to “ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all,” as well as SDG-13 to “take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.”
Until now what has been missing is evidence of the potential of off-grid technologies to achieve both SDG-7 and SDG-13 in a cheaper, cleaner and smarter manner than other alternatives.
New evidence from the GIZ, Reiner Lemoine Institute and the greenwerk. study “Off-Grid Renewable Energy for Climate Action” is without ambiguity: off-grid renewable energy solutions, such as clean energy mini-grids and solar home systems have significant environmental, practical, economic and socio-economic merits over grid expansion.
Download Report >>
Visit Website >>
Publication date: March 2020
Author: ENERGIA
Description: In this ENERGIA News you will find evidence and highlights from the Gender and Energy Research programme, in which ENERGIA has worked, since 2014, with nine teams of researchers in 12 countries. This research programme has built an evidence base to support informed policy making to decrease gender inequalities in energy access and benefits of energy access. It has contributed to the development of an evidence base for improving energy investment effectiveness by understanding and better addressing women’s specific needs for modern energy services. The objective of the Programme has been to generate and analyse empirical evidence on the links between gender, energy and poverty, and to inform policy and practice. The research themes were developed based on identification of priority gaps in evidence in the following areas: impacts of electrification; productive uses of energy; political economy of gender in energy sector; energy sector reform; the role of the private sector in scaling up energy access; women’s energy entrepreneurship.
Download Report >>
Publication date: March 2020
Author: Energy4Impact
Description: Between January 2017 and December 2019, Energy 4 Impact and CrossBoundary collected, cleaned and analysed 550 million data points for the Mini-Grid Innovation Lab, using smart meters, field surveys, and financial records from 62 sites of 12 mini-grid developers. The data collection had two main objectives: tracking how business model innovations, such as tariff reduction or appliance financing schemes, affected the revenues and costs of mini-grid developers; and measuring the socio-economic development impact on the communities served by the mini-grids. This report presents lessons from managing one of the largest mini-grid datasets in sub-Saharan Africa to date.
Download Report >>
Visit Website >>
Publication date: 2020, January
Author: GOGLA
Description: Building on Hystra’s experience working on solar for the past 10 years and GOGLA knowledge of their members, complemented with 15+ interviews of off-grid solar players and experts, this report presents the main cost drivers in the provision of quality products and services (including both upstream in product manufacturing, and downstream in product sales and added services) and the levers policymakers and industry players can use to narrow the price gap with non-quality products.
Download Report >>
Publication date: 2019, December
Author: IRENA
Description: Refugees and displaced people mostly depend on energy that is unsustainable and can harm their health and well-being. Sustainable energy based on renewables, in contrast, bridges the gap between humanitarian response and development, enhancing the well-being of displaced people and communities.
Download Report >>
Publication date: 2019, December
Author: USAID
Description: Energy utility companies in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are powerful drivers of economic and social development. Utilities are often among the largest employers in a community and can therefore drive socially inclusive economic development and empowerment when unlocking opportunities for women. Not only is hiring women anti-discriminatory, but effectively developing women’s talent can be key in improving a utility’s operational performance.
This brief presents new baseline data from across the SSA region to understand women’s roles and leadership in utilities, which will be essential to measure future progress of women’s participation in the sector. Additionally, this analysis identifies some of the interventions implemented by SSA utilities, such as on-campus recruiting activities, mentorship programs, and sexual harassment policies.
Download Report >>
Publication date: 2019, December
Author: IRENA
Description: Countries need to be increasingly ambitious in their pledges to scale up renewables and cut energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The first round of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) pledged under the Paris Agreement have proven inadequate to meet climate goals.
The new NDC round starting in 2020 represents an important chance to strengthen targets for renewables. This brief from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), released at the global climate meeting COP25 in late 2019, underlines the opportunity to address the climate threat, decarbonise energy use and simultaneously achieve multiple Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Download Report >>
