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Diesel, Dollars, and Debt: How Generators Worsen Africa’s Balance-of-Payments Crisis
For much of Africa, the diesel generator has become an unspoken pillar of the economy. It powers factories when the grid fails, keeps hospitals running during blackouts, and underwrites commercial...
Why Africa Is Rewriting the Language of the Energy Transition
There is a phrase that has followed Africa through almost every global climate forum in recent years: “clean energy for people and planet.” And it sounds inclusive, moral and hard to argue against....
Gas Is Back: What Mozambique’s LNG Revival Reveals About the Real Energy Transition
For years, the global energy transition has been narrated as a linear story: renewables rise, fossil fuels fall, and gas fades as a temporary bridge. That story is now colliding with reality. In late...
From Corridors to Contracts: Why Africa Is Losing Value After the Infrastructure Is Built
In parts of Africa, railways are being rehabilitated, ports are expanding, power lines are stretching across borders, and industrial corridors, once stalled by finance and politics, are re-entering...
Adaptation Is Becoming Africa’s Energy Trap
I grew up learning how to adapt to electricity failure. You learn early what time power usually goes out, you know when to charge phones, when to pump water, and when to run appliances. You learn the...
Africa’s Minerals Are Becoming Bilateral, And That’s a Strategic Risk
Africa sits at the centre of the global energy transition’s material foundations. The continent holds an estimated 30% of the world’s reserves of key transition minerals, including cobalt, manganese,...
Climate Finance Is No Longer About Promises, It’s About Power Systems
For most of the past decade, climate finance has been discussed as a moral equation. If African countries showed ambition, net-zero targets, transition plans, long lists of renewable projects, and...
Five Lines Africa Should Never Cross in Energy Transition Deals
Africa is being courted again. This time, the language is cleaner: energy transition, critical minerals, clean infrastructure, climate finance. The urgency is sharper, the timelines are shorter, and...
Africa’s Energy Paradox: Powering the Global Transition While Living in the Dark
Africa is central to the global energy transition, yet marginal within it. The minerals that make modern clean energy possible are increasingly sourced from Africa. Cobalt stabilises batteries,...
Africa’s Climate Finance Pivot: The Rise of National Funds in a Post-Pledge World
For more than a decade, Africa’s climate transition has rested on a delicate fiction: that global climate finance, however slow and insufficient, would eventually scale up. Pledges would harden into...
Gas, Phase-Out, and Africa: What the Debate Is Really About
I have lost count of how many times I have heard the same sentence, delivered with confidence and concern in equal measure: Africa needs gas as a transition fuel. It is said in conference halls,...
What Happens to Climate Negotiations When Big Emitters Walk Away
For years, global climate negotiations have relied on a fragile yet powerful idea: that collective action, however imperfect, is preferable to unilateral drift. The machinery of climate governance...