Gianluca Paesano

The Youth Sustainable Development Network has signed a clean energy MoU with Nigeria's Rural Electrification Agency, witnessed by power minister Joseph Tegbe, focused on productive use.

Cape Town has approved two hyperscale data centres drawing around 174MW once running, among the largest new loads to reach an African grid. As computing spreads, AI's growth is becoming a question for the power sector as much as for the technology industry.

Women were 9% of the Africa Energy Forum’s 700 delegates in 2012 and 37% of this year’s gathering in Cape Town, the Youth Energy Summit that ran inside it counted in. Those figures track a real change in the room, and in which of the sector’s hardest questions its senior women are now the ones […]

Sun King and the Rural Electrification Agency signed their manufacturing agreement last October, witnessed by Vice President Kashim Shettima, and the pieces have kept arriving since, financing in April and production targeted before the end of 2026. Behind it sit 12,000 jobs already created and monthly sales up from 3,000 to 75,000 in five years.

GOGLA's annual general meeting ran alongside June's Africa Energy Forum in Cape Town. The global off-grid solar association has published what it is carrying forward from the event. Durability is to stand beside connection counts as the measure that matters, backed by calls for governance over subsidy design and the shared data that would let investors price the market.

Ignite has announced a second IFC mandate and $233 million in financing agreed across the first half of the year, while IFC equity reached CrossBoundary Access in June and Nigerian developers signed an $83 million IFC-backed programme in April. Off-grid electrification's capital is arriving as repeatable structures, deal by deal

An estimated $8.6 trillion of what lies under African ground is unmined, much of it stranded without the transport and power to move it. At AEF, the Energy for Growth Hub's Gyude Moore, AFC's Ziyanda Mpakama and Transnet's Andile Sangqu set out the case for shared, open-access routes serving more than one mine.

Africa has more countries than any other continent, and a power system fragmented along every border between them. At AEF 2026, the AfDB's Wale Shonibare, Africa GreenCo's Lion Mashiri and Ndola Energy's Adrian Silwimba argued that continental-scale projects only become financeable when electricity can be traded as freely as it is generated.