M300 Africa Energy Summit Touts Electrifying Africa as ‘Mission Possible’
On 27 January 2025, the Mission 300 Africa Energy Summit kicked off in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. Along with development partners such as Power Africa, Agence Française de Developpement (AFD), several key organizations were also in attendance such as Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP) and Sustainable Energy for All (SE4All).
Tanzanian President Samia Hassan welcomed 25 African heads of state or government to the Summit. She also chaired a special session with the African Heads of State to ex;ore pathways for ‘Accelerating Energy Access Across Africa.’
Nordic Development Fund Managing Director Satu Santala stated that Mission 300 is not Mission Impossible! The interest and attendance to the Summit is already a sign of the level of engagement that the organizers have been able to garner to move Mission 300 forward.
The objective of Mission 300 (#M300) is to realize electricity access for 300 million Africans by 2030 and the conference revolves about policies, reforms, and actions needed to attain this laudable goal.
“We, in the philanthropic sector, have to recognize that everyone’s doing something different, hard, and important because what’s at stake is the future of Africa’s economy, the future of Africa’s young people, and the future of stability.”
Rockefeller Foundation President Rajiv Shah
M300 was initiated by the Rockefeller Foundation in partnership with the World Bank (WB) and African Development Bank (AfDB). In addition to accessing financing from Multilateral Development Banks (#MDB) and Development Finance Institutions (#DFI), it also intends to leverage philanthropic funds, pension funds and private equity. M300 is of the opinion that philanthropic grants can leverage an almost exponential amount of financing.
Already, at least USD 30 billion has been committed from various sources to advance Mission 300. At the Summit, additional funding was pledge brining the envelope to USD 50 billion by philanthropy, development partners and sovereign wealth funds (#SWF). The CEO of M300, Andrew Herscowitz, has a stated goal to mobilize a total of USD 80 billion in support of the mission.
As a concrete case of the action being performed, Nigeria secured a USD 1.1 billion loan from AfDB to expand electricity access for 5 million Nigerians by 2026. The deal was announced during the M300 Africa Energy Summit. In addition, Nigeria has a USD 1.2 billion Desert-to-Power program and another USD 500 million Nigeria-Grid Battery Energy Storage System (#ESS) to promote the use of renewable energy. The World Bank is also financing mini-grids and #PV systems in Nigeria to the tune of USD 750 million with the goal to provide more than 16 million Nigerians access to power.
At the end of the Summit, the African leaders adopted the Africa Energy Compact (#AEC), a concrete plan including specific reforms aimed at boosting #FDI into Africa’s energy sector.