The Makings of an African Century - Where African and European Ambitions Meet

A strong, stable and prosperous Africa is not only vital for Africans, it is essential for Europe. Cooperation between the two continents is hardly new and a lot of progress has been made, but Africa and Europe can and must go much further together.

Too much of the African continent is still plagued by a lack of decent basic infrastructures, slow growth, extreme poverty, pandemics, droughts, civil wars, terrorism and poor governance.

But Africa also has abundant resources – its most precious being its young, rapidly-growing population. Hand in hand with Africa’s youth, African and EU leaders must develop transformative joint solutions to make the most of their partnership and adapt it to today’s realities.

Uruguai - Síntese País [AICEP]

Electrifying Africa: how to make Europe’s contribution count

Executive summary

Electrification is one of sub-Saharan Africa’s most pressing socio-economic challenges. Less than a third of the sub-Saharan population has access to electricity, and around 600,000 premature deaths are caused each year by household air pollution resulting from the use of polluting fuels for cooking and lighting.

Solving this issue is a fundamental prerequisite for unleashing sub-Saharan Africa’s economic potential. Given the magnitude of the challenge, only a joint effort involving sub-Saharan African countries and international public and private parties would pave the way to a solution.

Sub-Saharan African countries should be the first to move. They should reform the governance of their energy sectors, in particular by reforming their generally inefficient state-owned electricity utilities, and by phasing-out market-distorting energy subsidies. Without such reforms, international investment will never scale-up across sub-Saharan Africa.

International public and private parties must play a key role in facilitating sub-Saharan Africa’s energy transformation, particularly the electrification of rural areas, where three-fifths of the sub-Saharan African population lives. International public support is particularly important to crowd-in international private investors, most notably through innovative public-private partnerships.

China and the United States are already engaged in electrification in sub-Saharan Africa. China has substantially invested in large-scale electricity projects, while the US has put in place a comprehensive initiative – Power Africa – to scale-up electrification, particularly in rural areas, through public-private partnerships.

Europe has, instead, created a myriad of fragmented initiatives to promote electrification in sub-Saharan Africa, limiting their potential leverage in crowding-in private investment and in stimulating energy sector reforms in sub-Saharan African countries. This sub-optimal situation should be changed by coordinating the initiatives of European institutions and EU countries through a unique platform. We propose such a platform: the EU Electrify Africa Hotspot.

http://bruegel.org/reader/Electrifying_Africa?utm_source=Bruegel+Updates&utm_campaign=899f319a12-PUBLICATION+ALERT+%7C+Electrifying+Africa&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_eb026b984a-899f319a12-278058649&mc_cid=899f319a12&mc_eid=602461abd0#

São Tomé e Príncipe - Ficha de Mercado [AICEP]