Africa today faces a dual challenge: meeting its population’s growing energy needs while also pursuing a sustainable energy transition. In this context, local authorities are emerging as key players. But for them to play their role, certain conditions must be in place. This text explores the necessary legal and administrative foundations, available financial mechanisms, and inspiring examples already at work on the continent.
The local energy transition in Africa is an urgent necessity in the face of climate, economic, and social challenges. To successfully achieve this transition, local authorities must overcome several obstacles: legal, administrative, financial, and social. This article presents the essential prerequisites to put in place, the financial levers to mobilize, and concrete examples from Africa illustrating how to effectively move toward this transformation.
I. Legal and Administrative Prerequisites
Before mobilizing resources or partners, communities must be able to rely on a clear framework and solid capacities. Here are the five main pillars to build.
1. Clarifying Legal Frameworks: The Necessary Starting Point
For any local authority wishing to play an active role in energy, the first obstacle to overcome is legal. In many African countries, laws are unclear, centralized, or ill-adapted to local dynamics. This makes local investment in energy production or distribution difficult, if not impossible.
What are the possible solutions?
- It is imperative to clearly define the powers of local authorities in terms of energy production, distribution and sale.
- Unjustified monopolies, often inherited from obsolete centralized models, must be lifted.
- Harmonization of regional regulations would provide a more transparent and attractive environment for investors.
- Finally, encouraging local content and integrating local businesses can promote endogenous economic development.
In short: without a clear framework, there is no visibility, no credibility, and no possible financing.
2. Strengthening Local Capacity: An Imperative for Taking Action
Once the legal foundations have been laid, local authorities still need to have the means to achieve their ambitions. However, many suffer from a glaring lack of technical and administrative skills to manage complex energy projects.
Concrete answers exist:
- Municipal engineers and project managers should be trained in partnership with universities and technical centers.
- The creation of local energy units would allow for better planning and monitoring of initiatives.
- Finally, exchanges of experiences between advanced and less experienced communities can enable rapid and effective mutual learning.
In some countries, it will be necessary to implement a comprehensive strategy to provide local governments with human resources, from which the energy sector can benefit.
The challenge is simple: a community with well-trained human resources inspires greater confidence in investors and attracts more partners.
3. Facilitate Access to Finance: Lift the Main Obstacle
Even with clear texts and competent teams, nothing is possible without money. Financing is undoubtedly one of the main obstacles to local energy development. Too often, projects are abandoned due to a lack of resources.
What are the strategies to favor?
- Create dedicated funds funded by States, citizens, the diaspora, and technical and financial partners.
- Develop accessible credits via public banks such as the AfDB or the BOAD.
- Stimulate Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs), which combine the strengths of the public and private sectors.
- Finally, focus on financial innovation: crowdfunding, citizen cooperatives, municipal green bonds.
The key here is diversifying sources of financing to secure and sustain projects.
4. Simplify and Harmonize Procedures: Make Administration a Facilitator
Another often underestimated factor is administrative complexity. Many communities abandon energy projects simply because of insurmountable bureaucratic obstacles.
To change this:
- It is useful to create support centers dedicated to energy to guide communities in their efforts.
- Standardizing rules and fees at the national or regional level would improve clarity.
- The dissemination of practical guides on the implementation of energy projects would help local teams to better equip themselves.
The objective is clear: to make administration a lever for facilitation, and not a brake on local innovation.
5. Ensuring a Just and Inclusive Transition: Energy at the Service of Populations
The energy transition must not only be technical. It must also be social and democratic. Too often, projects are designed without the participation of local populations, which undermines their acceptability and effectiveness.
How can we make this transition more inclusive?
- Involving communities from the design phase of projects is a democratic imperative. It also allows for better management of transitions and changes with local populations.
- Setting up participatory funds allows citizens to become co-investors and beneficiaries.
- Finally, organizing regular citizen consultations encourages support, transparency, and the management of difficulties that such a project could encounter.
Ultimately, a successful transition is one that benefits everyone.
II. Examples that go in the right direction in Africa
Several African countries have already taken significant steps toward energy decentralization. These experiences offer valuable lessons.
1. Decentralization of electrical regulation :
Countries like Nigeria have recently amended their constitutions and legislation to decentralize the electricity sector. In 2023, Nigeria amended its constitution and enacted a new Electricity Act that empowers states to establish electricity generation, transmission, and distribution markets within their territories.
In concrete terms, Nigerian states can now enact their own laws and issue licenses for local electricity projects, marking the end of the national regulator’s monopoly on these activities. Five states (Imo, Enugu, Ekiti, Ondo, and Oyo) have already implemented local legislative and regulatory frameworks in accordance with this reform.
2. Opening of the market to producing municipalities :
In South Africa, where electricity was historically dominated by the national utility, Eskom, regulations have evolved to include municipalities.
In October 2020, the South African Department of Energy amended regulations to allow municipalities to develop or purchase their own electricity. This is a major shift that allows cities like Cape Town and Johannesburg to launch calls for tenders for renewable energy and reduce their dependence on the national grid.
Already, at least five large municipalities are involved in green electricity supply processes following this reform.
Additionally, South Africa has raised the capacity threshold for projects requiring a national license from 1 MW to 100 MW, facilitating the deployment of decentralized projects by local or private actors.
3. Incentive frameworks for rural mini-grids :
Tanzania is a regional pioneer in decentralized energy. In 2008, it adopted an innovative mini-grid policy and regulatory framework aimed at encouraging private and community investment in underserved areas .
Thanks to this framework, the number of mini-grids has doubled and more than 100 mini-grids are now operated by a diversity of actors, including the national company (TANESCO), private companies, religious organizations, and local communities that own and manage their own electricity systems.
This model shows that with regulatory support, local initiatives (village cooperatives, etc.) can thrive in the energy sector.
4. Involvement of local governments in project approval :
Even when energy planning remains national, some legislation gives local authorities a role in implementation. For example, in Kenya, the Physical and Land Use Planning Act of 2019 gives counties the power to enact procedures and standards governing energy activities within their jurisdictions.
In concrete terms, any decentralised production project (off-grid solar, etc.) must first obtain a certificate of no objection and planning permission from the local county before applying for a licence from the national energy regulator (EPRA).
This provision ensures that projects align with local plans and involve local authorities from the design phase.
5. National policies favorable to community energy :
Other indirect legal mechanisms encourage local engagement. Several countries have introduced feed-in tariffs or net-metering schemes open to small renewable installations, allowing local authorities or cooperatives to sell electricity to the national grid.
For example, decentralized renewable energy programs supported by the Rural Electrification Agency in Senegal or by AMADER in Mali offer subsidies and guaranteed purchase contracts to local rural electrification operators.
Such systems, when properly legally regulated, encourage local stakeholders (communities, local businesses, NGOs) to invest in small solar, hydroelectric or biomass power plants to serve their community.
These examples show that well-designed reforms can bear concrete fruits.
Conclusion
Accelerating the local energy transition in Africa is a legitimate, necessary, and now technically feasible ambition. However, the right foundations must be laid: clarifying local government responsibilities, strengthening their skills, simplifying administrative procedures, involving local populations, and building an incentive-based legal framework. Analysis of several African countries shows that these reforms are not only possible, but that they produce concrete results when the right conditions are met.
However, one last lever remains fundamental: financing. Because without mobilized and accessible resources, the best intentions will remain ineffective. In the third and final article of this series, we will explore in detail the financial solutions adapted to African local authorities: public budgets, private partnerships, innovative mechanisms, and international best practices. A decisive step towards making the energy transition a real driver of local development.
