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Minerals Corridors in Africa: Climate, Infrastructure & Energy Transition (2026)
For much of modern history, Africa’s mineral wealth was treated as a geological inevitability rather than a strategic asset. Copper left the continent as ore. Cobalt moved raw across oceans. Value...

What Young Africans Are Teaching Us About the Energy Future
The most radical thing I have learned about Africa’s energy future did not come from a policy report, a donor strategy, or a conference panel. It came from watching young Africans refuse to wait. In...

Africa, China and the US: The New Geopolitics of the Energy Transition
For much of the last decade, the global energy transition was framed as a technical exercise, a matter of replacing fossil fuels with renewables, coal plants with solar farms, and internal combustion...

The Day a Solar Lamp Changed My Life
I grew up counting nights by how dark they felt. In our part of Nigeria, as in most parts of Africa, darkness was not just the absence of light; it was a condition that shaped behaviour. When the sun...

How Africa Can Build the World’s Most Resilient Power Grids
Across Africa, electricity grids are failing more frequently and for more reasons than ever before. Floods wash away transmission lines, heatwaves overload transformers, conflict knocks out...

Africa Has Over $1 Trillion at Home. Why Isn’t It Financing Clean Energy Yet?
Africa’s energy transition is often described as a problem of scarcity: there is not enough capital, not enough concessional finance, and not enough international support. But this diagnosis is...

I’ve Watched Villages Wait for Decades. This Is What Climate Finance Should Fix First.
I still remember the first time I saw electricity reach a village.It was late in the 1990s, and I was a boy visiting my grandmother’s house in Cross River State, Nigeria. A single light bulb...

Can Development Banks Really Deliver Africa’s Energy Transition, Or Are They Still Lending Too Carefully?
If finance is the lifeblood of the energy transition, Africa’s arteries are still half-blocked. In 2024, the world’s multilateral development banks (MDBs) reported record climate commitments $137...

Why “Climate Money” Rarely Reaches the Villages And What I’ve Seen in the Gaps
Every year, the rains come and go. The villagers gather at the same broken borehole, filling buckets from puddles that the government once promised to replace with solar-powered pumps. Somewhere in...

Diesel Generators in Africa (2026): Why They Cost Billions and What It Means for Power Systems
Every evening in Lagos, the city begins to hum with the roar of generators. The noise rises like a second atmosphere, mechanical and relentless, from every corner of the city. A barber restarts his...

The Strength of African Communities Living Without Power
There is a sound I remember from my childhood, not the noise of generators or the crackle of candles, but the soft murmur of neighbours talking in the dark. Entire evenings lit only by moonlight or...

Africa’s Electricity Access Targets Are Failing: Here’s the Blueprint to Fix Them
There is a sentence repeated in nearly every African energy policy document: “universal access by 2030.” It is optimistic, visionary and mathematically impossible. With just five years to go, Africa...
