Mission 300 Has the Money and the Declaration. Its Weak Point Is the Utilities That Must Deliver It
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. Connecting 300 million people in six years means roughly 50 million a year. 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.
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. 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. Tariffs are often set below the cost of supply, technical and commercial losses are high, and governments themselves are frequently among the worst payers.
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. Mission 300 is well conceived, adequately funded at the start and built on the right principle of country ownership.