Electrifying Africa: how to make Europe’s contribution count

Electrification is one of sub-Saharan Africa’s most pressing socio-economic challenges. Europe has created a myriad of fragmented initiatives to promo

Publishing date: 08 June 2017
Authors: Simone Tagliapietra

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Electrification is one of sub-Saharan Africa’s most pressing socio-economic challenges. Less than a third of the sub-Saharan population has access to electricity, and around 600,000 premature deaths are caused each year by household air pollution resulting from the use of polluting fuels for cooking and lighting.

Solving this issue is a fundamental prerequisite for unleashing sub-Saharan Africa’s economic potential. Given the magnitude of the challenge, only a joint effort involving sub-Saharan African countries and international public and private parties would pave the way to a solution.

Sub-Saharan African countries should be the first to move. They should reform the governance of their energy sectors, in particular by reforming their generally inefficient state-owned electricity utilities, and by phasing-out market-distorting energy subsidies. Without such reforms, international investment will never scale-up across sub-Saharan Africa.

International public and private parties must play a key role in facilitating sub-Saharan Africa’s energy transformation, particularly the electrification of rural areas, where three-fifths of the sub-Saharan African population lives. International public support is particularly important to crowd-in international private investors, most notably through innovative public-private partnerships.

China and the United States are already engaged in electrification in sub-Saharan Africa. China has substantially invested in large-scale electricity projects, while the US has put in place a comprehensive initiative – Power Africa – to scale-up electrification, particularly in rural areas, through public-private partnerships.

Europe has, instead, created a myriad of fragmented initiatives to promote electrification in sub-Saharan Africa, limiting their potential leverage in crowding-in private investment and in stimulating energy sector reforms in sub-Saharan African countries. This sub-optimal situation should be changed by coordinating the initiatives of European institutions and EU countries through a unique platform. We propose such a platform: the EU Electrify Africa Hotspot.

About the authors

Simone Tagliapietra

Simone Tagliapietra is a Senior fellow at Bruegel.

He is also a Part-time professor at the Florence School of Transnational Governance (STG) of the European University Institute and an Adjunct professor at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) Europe of The Johns Hopkins University.

His research focuses on the EU climate and energy policy, and on its industrial and social dimensions. With a record of numerous policy and scientific publications, also in leading journals such as Nature and Science, he is the author of Global Energy Fundamentals (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and co-author of The Macroeconomics of Decarbonisation (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

On the basis of his policy and scientific production, Dr. Tagliapietra regularly supports EU and national institutions in the development of their public policies in the field of climate and energy, also through regular interaction with public decision-makers in EU and national institutions, as well as through regular parliamentary testimonies in the European Parliament and various national parliamentary assemblies inside and outside Europe, such as the French Senate, the UK House of Lords and the US Senate. His columns and policy work are widely published and cited in leading international media.

Dr. Tagliapietra also is a Member of the Board of Directors of the Clean Air Task Force (CATF) and Senior associate of the Payne Institute at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden. He holds a PhD in International Political Economy from the Catholic University of Milan, where he previously graduated under the supervision of Professor Alberto Quadrio Curzio and where he also served as an Assistant professor (tenure-track) until 2024. Born in the Dolomites in 1988, he speaks Italian, English and French.