FINALLY, the federal government has declared the Nigeria’s electricity sector open for investment at the ongoing #Mission300 African Energy Summit in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Wale Edun discloased this while Addressing selected investors and development partners on Monday evening.
Edun highlighted Nigeria’s electricity sector as a prime opportunity for investment. He emphasised the nation’s commitment to macroeconomic stability, clean energy goals, and achieving universal energy access.
This was disclosed in an official statement made available on the Ministry of Finance X (formerly Twitter) account on Monday.
Approximately 80 per cent of people worldwide without access to electricity reside in Nigeria and other nations across sub-Saharan Africa, despite a reduction of over 10 million in this population, according to a report.
The International Energy Agency (IEA), in its latest Country Data on Electricity Access report, highlighted that the number of individuals lacking electricity has dropped from over 760 million to below 750 million within the past year.
“The most severe gap persists in sub-Saharan Africa, where 80 per cent of the global population without electricity access live. After three years of backsliding, progress resumed in 2023, driven by an acceleration in grid connections, continued growth in solar-home systems deployment, and, to a lesser extent, new mini-grids development.
“Six hundred million sub-Saharan Africans still lacked access to electricity, a number higher than in 2019. Even with continued progress in 2024 as suggested by preliminary reporting, the number of people without access to electricity in the region will still be slightly higher than in 2019 by the end of this year,” the report stated.
The World Bank Group is partnering with the African Development Bank and other partners on Mission 300, an ambitious initiative to connect 300 million people to electricity in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2030.
Mission 300 aims to accelerate the pace of electrification in Sub-Saharan Africa while ensuring that the transition to more diversified and cleaner sources of energy meets growing demand, brings economic growth, and creates jobs.
Efforts by the partners are also focused on investing in generation, transmission, distribution, regional interconnection, and sector reform to ensure quality, reliability, and affordability of power supply.
The World Bank said that Mission 300 will only be realised with partnerships and ambition. “Reaching this goal will require: governments to do more on sector reforms and make electricity utilities financially viable.
“The private sector to step in and scale up investments in distributed energy solutions, as well as grid-connected power generation and new models for transmission and distribution; and partners including other multilateral development banks and philanthropies to mobilize more public and concessional financing for both on-grid and off-grid electrification.”