Can Gas Bring Electricity to More Africans? Look to the Evidence, Not Partisan Politics

The 2020s are meant to be the decade when Africa achieves universal electricity access. This is according to UN Sustainable Development Goal 7 and the energy plans of many countries. Yet halfway through, divisive political agendas are threatening progress, not least as they influence how public funds are spent.

The Trump government, with its deep hostility to renewables and foreign aid, has already dismantled U.S. programs and institutions that brought electricity to African households and businesses. Funding for the African Development Bank and Just Energy Transition Partnerships​, both of which bankrolled clean electrification projects on the continent, has also been eliminated. The EU meanwhile remains broadly supportive of Africa’s energy ambitions, yet member countries are slashing their aid budgets in response to fractious domestic disputes over defense and energy security.

These setbacks come as efforts to reach the roughly 600 million Africans living without electricity are already underfunded. Estimated price tags have run as high as 53 billion a year, yet actual investment is rarely a tenth of that.

Electricity access has become a polarizing topic within Africa itself, not least because of arguments over the proper role of fossil fuels, gas especially. For years, a vocal contingent—led by politicians, think tanks and private foundations—has claimed that if African countries stop extracting and burning gas, millions of people will go without electricity service.

Desires to harness Africa’s gas for energy are understandable. Many countries have huge unmet needs, gas reserves remain mostly untapped, and leaders are angry about wealthy nations’ hypocrisy and double standards around the energy transition.

Yet gas’s ability to deliver electricity to more Africans should not be taken on faith. The third module of NRGI’s Gas-to-Power Framework—out now—interrogates the claim that investing more in gas power will allow countries to achieve universal electricity access. It offers considerations and questions for assessing when countries should use gas or other options like solar or wind to reach people living without electricity. The framework lays out the latest thinking in a balanced way, to support readers in their own analysis, decision-making and advocacy.

The data tells a more nuanced story than most political rhetoric around gas. It shows that gas is currently the top fuel for power generation in Africa and has contributed meaningfully to electricity access. Several gas producing countries—Mozambique, Cote d’Ivoire and Tanzania, for instance—each delivered power to millions of people over the last two decades. African fossil fuel producers also tend to have higher electricity access rates than non-producers.

In at least some of these same countries, access rates rose along with the use of gas for power, suggesting that significant numbers of new users owe their service to gas.

Looking ahead, gas power will deliver electricity to at least some new African customers. Producers like Ghana, Senegal and Nigeria will connect more households and businesses to gas power for technical or commercial reasons, or because gas already dominates their energy mixes.

Ultimately, however, the data shows that gas has limited potential to address Africa’s unmet electricity needs. Almost none of the countries where access improved the most over the 2010s relied on gas power plants. And for nearly all the 20 countries with the largest remaining unserved populations, gas power is simply not a viable option, whether due to lack of production, infrastructure or investment.

Instead, the use of gas for electricity will remain heavily concentrated in four North African countries which already have universal access.

And worldwide, gas will mainly serve the needs and aspirations of the wealthy. Between 2013 and 2022, ten mostly high-income countries added 325 gigawatts of gas power to their grids. The whole of Sub-Saharan Africa added just seven. The U.S. alone is planning to build three dozen new gas power plants, By contrast, Sub-Saharan Africa secured funding for just two in recent years.

Given these limitations, African countries with access challenges should fully consider alternatives. As technologies for improving electricity access, solar and wind have some clear advantages, which our new module surveys. For years, solar power in Africa has been growing several times faster than gas (left graphic) in a much higher number of countries (right graphic).

By 2030, the average costs of solar PV and wind power are predicted to fall below that of electricity made from gas in many countries. At the same time, the rapid scale-up of renewables on the continent remains challenging, and for low-income customers especially. A lack of quality components, economies of scale and affordable financing options are among the main barriers to growth.

Today, many of the arguments touting gas or renewables for universal access are based on sweeping, emotive claims that reflect the biases and personal interests of the speaker. These include powerful state-owned enterprises and fossil fuel giants like Eni, Total or BP, who mainly want to profit by exporting Africa’s gas to wealthy countries. But the real work of electrification isn’t ideological. It is painstaking and technical.

To keep expanding the well-known benefits of electricity access, policymakers and development partners need to zoom into the details. Real-world choices between on- and off-grid solutions, or between gas or renewable fuels, are highly context specific, requiring careful consultation, analysis, modeling and policy support. In particular, decision-makers must address thorny issues of affordability and reliability, since lower-income customers may be unable or unwilling to pay for expensive, patchy service.

Electricity access work also requires stable financial support over years. It isn’t something funders can dip in and out of as the political winds shift. Now that the U.S. and Europe are retreating, foundations, development banks and other partners need to step into the gaps. Because even in this challenging time, good things are happening. During the 2010s, the number of people living without electricity dropped by almost halfand individual countries are still making progress. New funding initiatives are also springing up—the AfDB- and World Bank-led Mission 300, for example.

Vulnerable African households, businesses, schools and health centers should not be used as pawns in overheated, zero-sum fights about the future of fossil fuels. The stories told about Africa’s electricity systems must reflect people’s lived realities, in all their complexity, struggle, and aspiration. Our new gas framework module describes the kind of hard work that is needed to achieve that.