If 2025 is remembered for one thing on the African continent, it should be progress on the energy agenda. But it was also a year in which that progress began to move in two different directions — and only one is likely to prove truly transformational.
The first source of progress relates to Mission 300 – an initiative that was formally launched in April 2024 but shifted from ambition to implementation in January 2025, as governments and partners confronted a harder question: not just how many people could be connected to electricity, but whether Africa’s power systems could sustain themselves financially and support productive economic activity.
Mission 300’s Dar es Salaam Energy Declaration, endorsed by 48 countries, committed governments and partners to accelerate electricity access for 300 million people by 2030 through power-sector reforms, country-led energy compacts, and crucially the mobilisation of private investment. The declaration acknowledged a hard reality: public finance and donor funding alone will not deliver electrification at scale.
This shift mattered: while Mission 300 was focused on expanding residential connections, practitioners working to advance energy access emphasise the real test, is whether reforms can credibly crowd in firms that rely on reliable, affordable power.
Meanwhile, the second source of progress came in the form of concrete investment decisions.
In particular, Africa’s largest private industrialist, Aliko Dangote, advanced a series of major investments across the continent in 2025. In Ethiopia, a $400m cement expansion; in Côte d’Ivoire, the commissioning of a $160m integrated cement plant; in Nigeria, the scaling of energy-intensive industrial and refinery-linked infrastructure. In Zimbabwe he announced a billion-dollar, three-pronged investment spanning cement manufacturing, power generation and a petroleum pipeline. The project was precisely the kind of private capital signal the Dar es Salaam Declaration sought to catalyse long-term investment anchored in industrial load, infrastructure reliability and energy security, rather than short-term access targets. Crucially this project is designed to anchor and power his own operations, reducing dependence on the grid and ensuring industrial reliability.
In addition, the long-anticipated commissioning of Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) marked a parallel, public-sector bet on productive power at scale. With a planned capacity of over 6GW, making it Africa’s largest hydroelectric project, comparable in scale to Brazil’s Belo Monte Dam. GERD is set to transform Ethiopia’s electricity system by increasing baseload generation, reducing reliance on thermal power, and enabling cross-border electricity exports across the Horn. Like Dangote’s industrial investments, GERD’s significance lies not in household connections alone, but in its potential to anchor industrial demand, stabilise utility revenues and support regional power trade — the system-level conditions Mission 300, in fact, depends on.
Taken together, these projects are a perfect illustration of what development practitioners, and the original vision of Mission 300 had overlooked. Firms expand when they have energy, infrastructure and stable conditions. Industries cannot run on intermittent power. Indeed, as argued by Georgetown professor Ken Opalo, firm-led expansion must sit at the centre of Africa’s electrification agenda.
Energy access framed as “connections only” risks sidelining the needs of manufacturing, processing, enterprises and value-chain expansion which in turn undermines broader development goals. It should fundamentally reshape Africa’s energy systems by strengthening national and regional grids, improving efficiency and lowering the cost of electricity so that firms can grow, compete and create jobs. Unreliable electricity doesn’t just inconvenience firms, studies across Ghana and Nigeria found that outages reduce employment by about 14 percentage points; businesses delay expansion, scale back production, or shut down entirely when they cannot operate machinery, power equipment, or keep services running.
Extending electricity access to low-income households without factoring in affordability, creates a cycle of unsustainable subsidies, financially strained utilities, and mounting government debt. When firms thrive, households naturally gain access, either because rising incomes allow them to afford connections or because governments have more revenue to support social programs.
In Nigeria, the scaling of energy-intensive industrial and refinery infrastructure supports tens of thousands of jobs across operations and downstream value chains, alongside significant fiscal contributions. These effects matter because they translate productive power into incomes, enabling households to afford electricity connections and tariffs without permanent subsidy, while easing pressure on utilities through a broader tax base. Productive power thus creates a virtuous cycle: firms anchor demand and stabilise revenues, incomes rise, and governments gain fiscal space to target subsidies rather than apply them system-wide – the basis of economically sustainable electrification.
Connecting 300 million people to electricity is politically appealing but economically incomplete. Focusing on alleviating deficits rather than building competitive capabilities risks short-termism, treating electricity as a social good rather than the production fuel that drives competitiveness. Expanding access matters, but countries industrialise by electrifying factories, not just households. China’s industrial rise illustrates this clearly: by the early 1990s, over 70% of its electricity went to factories and industrial zones, long before universal household electrification.
With a few strategic shifts, Mission 300 could become the decade’s defining industrialisation play. By anchoring regional power pools, integrating energy markets and lowering electricity costs, it could unlock African-led investment at scale, making African capital the norm rather than the exception.
Targets alone are not a development strategy. Electrification must be redesigned around African priorities, economic realities and the productive engines that will drive long-term growth.
Teta Mukulira is a policy analyst on the decolonising development team at Development Reimagined.
