On 28 January 2025 thirty African heads of state and government endorsed the Dar es Salaam Energy Declaration at the Mission 300 Africa Energy Summit in Tanzania. Mission 300 is the joint effort led by the World Bank Group and the African Development Bank Group to connect 300 million Africans to electricity by 2030, roughly half of the more than 600 million people on the continent who currently have no access. The two banks said they plan to allocate USD 48 billion in financing to the mission through 2030, and partners pledged more than USD 50 billion in support at the summit. The banks also launched Zafiri, an investment company for private-sector solutions such as mini-grids and solar home systems, with anchor partners investing up to USD 300 million in a first phase. Twelve countries presented national energy compacts setting out reforms and delivery plans. The declaration is to go to the African Union summit in February for adoption.
This is the most serious attempt in years to tackle the access gap at scale, and the decision to anchor it in country compacts rather than in a single continental target is correct. Our view, though, is that the binding constraint is not money or political will at a summit. It is the financial health of the national utilities and the willingness of governments to set tariffs that let them function. Mission 300 will succeed or fail in the boring places: tariff orders, utility balance sheets and connection costs.
Why the target is plausible on paper
The arithmetic of Mission 300 is demanding but not absurd. Connecting 300 million people in six years means roughly 50 million a year. A large share will come from grid extension and densification in and around towns, where the network already exists but many households remain unconnected because they cannot pay connection charges or because the utility lacks the capital to add transformers and service lines. The rest will come from distributed solar: mini-grids for villages and solar home systems for dispersed households.
The cost of distributed solar has fallen sharply over the past decade, and the business models for pay-as-you-go solar home systems are well developed in East Africa. Zafiri is designed to address what the banks describe as a persistent equity gap in that segment. Grid densification is cheaper per connection than building new lines into remote areas. A programme that sequences these intelligently, densifying the grid where it reaches, using mini-grids where demand clusters and home systems elsewhere, can reach large numbers quickly.
Why the compacts matter
The national energy compacts are the most interesting part of the design. Each country sets out its own targets and the reforms it will make, such as tariff adjustments, utility restructuring, private participation rules and regulatory changes. The financing is then linked to delivery of those reforms. This is a recognition that the access gap is a policy problem as much as an investment problem. Many African countries already have electrification plans. What they have lacked is the institutional and financial framework to execute them.
Our concern is that compacts are only as strong as their enforcement. Development finance has a long history of reform conditions that are agreed at signing and quietly diluted during implementation. If a government declines to raise tariffs before an election, will the banks slow disbursement? If a utility misses its loss-reduction targets, will financing be withheld? Mission 300's credibility depends on the answer being yes, at least sometimes.
The utility problem
Most sub-Saharan African utilities do not recover their costs. Tariffs are often set below the cost of supply, technical and commercial losses are high, and governments themselves are frequently among the worst payers. Each new connection to a loss-making utility can deepen its losses, because new households typically consume little electricity, often below the level at which the revenue covers the cost of serving them. Utilities therefore have weak incentives to connect poor households, even when donors pay for the connection itself.
That is why the access target cannot be separated from the question of what happens after connection. A household that is connected but receives power for only a few hours a day, or cannot afford to use it, has gained little. The World Bank's own approach to measuring access has moved towards a multi-tier framework that considers reliability, capacity and affordability, not only a wire to the house. Mission 300 should report against that broader measure, not only against the headline number of connections.
Generation supply matters too. Connecting tens of millions of new customers to grids that already ration power in the dry season, or that depend on imported fuel for thermal plants, will worsen reliability unless new generation and regional interconnection are built at the same time. The compacts should therefore be read alongside each country's generation and transmission plans, and the banks should be wary of counting connections to grids that cannot supply them.
Productive use is the key to sustainability
The most effective way to make new connections commercially sustainable is to pair them with productive uses of electricity: irrigation pumps, cold storage, grain milling, small manufacturing and digital services. These raise consumption, generate income that allows households and firms to pay, and improve the economics of mini-grids in particular. Several of the compacts include productive-use elements. They should be central rather than peripheral, because they turn electricity from a cost the utility bears into a revenue it can earn.
What to watch
Three indicators will tell us whether the mission is on track. First, tariff decisions in compact countries over the next two years, especially where elections fall. Second, utility loss rates and collection rates, which show whether the system can absorb new customers. Third, the share of new connections that come with productive-use support or demand stimulation, which indicates whether consumption is likely to grow.
Our assessment
Mission 300 is well conceived, adequately funded at the start and built on the right principle of country ownership. It is also exposed to the same weaknesses that have limited previous electrification drives: underpriced tariffs, insolvent utilities and political reluctance to enforce reform. The banks deserve credit for linking money to compacts. They will deserve more if they hold governments to them. The test is not whether 300 million connections are counted by 2030, but whether those connections are still delivering useful power five years later.